Andrej Karpathy California, USA

Andrej Karpathy works at Tesla as the director of AI, focusing on the perception of the Autopilot. Previously being a Research Scientist at “OpenAI” working on Deep Learning in Computer Vision, Generative Modeling and Reinforcement Learning.

Andrej has an extensive background in AI-related fields, having completed a PhD at Stanford University in computer vision, where he worked with Fei-Fei Li on Convolutional/Recurrent Neural Network architectures and their applications in Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing and their intersection. His dissertation work focused on creating a system by which a neural network could identify multiple discrete and specific items within an image, label them using natural language and report to a user. The dissertation also included developing a system that works in reverse, allowing for a model that can use descriptions from a user articulated in natural language (i.e. “white tennis shoes”) and find that object in a given image.

Over the course of his PhD he carried out two internships at Google where he worked on large-scale feature learning over YouTube videos, and in 2015 interned at DeepMind and worked on Deep Reinforcement Learning. Together with Fei-Fei, he designed and taught a new Stanford class on Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition. The class was the first Deep Learning course offering at Stanford and a remarkable statistic shows that the class has grown from 150 enrolled students in 2015 to 330 students in 2016, and 750 students in 2017.