What Did Andrej Karpathy Do at Tesla and OpenAI?

Updated

Andrej Karpathy held two distinct roles at OpenAI and one major leadership role at Tesla. According to his personal site, he was a founding member and research scientist at OpenAI from 2015 to 2017, then served as Director of AI at Tesla from 2017 to 2022, and returned to OpenAI from 2023 to 2024 to build a team focused on midtraining and synthetic data generation. The sections below break down each role based on what his site states.

At Tesla (2017–2022): Director of AI

Karpathy led the computer vision team behind Tesla Autopilot. His site describes the scope of that team's work in three parts:

  • In-house data labeling — the team handled all of Tesla's own labeling rather than outsourcing it.
  • Neural network training — model development ran in-house.
  • Deployment on Tesla's custom inference chip — the trained networks were deployed onto Tesla's own hardware.

He also notes he worked on Tesla Optimus "very briefly," so his involvement with the humanoid robot program was limited compared with Autopilot.

On the goal of the work, his site is direct: today Autopilot increases the safety and convenience of driving, but the team's goal was to make Full Self-Driving a reality at scale. He points to the August 2021 Tesla AI Day for more detail.

At OpenAI (2015–2017): Founding Member and Research Scientist

Karpathy was a research scientist and a founding member at OpenAI during its earliest years. His site lists this as a 2015–2017 role, placing him there before he moved to Tesla.

Return to OpenAI (2023–2024): Midtraining and Synthetic Data

He came back to OpenAI for a second period, where his site says he "built a new team working on midtraining and synthetic data generation." This is the most specific description of his second stint — the site does not list a title for this period, only the team's focus areas.

How the Timeline Fits Together

Period Organization Role
2015–2017 OpenAI Research scientist, founding member
2017–2022 Tesla Director of AI (Autopilot vision team; briefly Optimus)
2023–2024 OpenAI Built a team on midtraining and synthetic data generation

His site presents these as a chronological overview rather than a detailed project log, so for deeper technical context on the Tesla work, the August 2021 Tesla AI Day is the reference he points to.