For others: Andrej Karpathy is the director of artificial intelligence and Autopilot Vision at Tesla.

Was on front page yesterday for a presentation on Tesla's Autopilot / Autonomous features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSDTZQdo6H8

He was doing this kind of hobby work well before. I learnt solving Rubik's cube from his page[0].

[0] http://badmephisto.com

Woah, he's him? Same here!

I had no idea!!! That's amazing.

Same - recognised the domain instantly! Used it to teach my son as well.

What a pleasant surprise!

Oh wow, me too.

I think I still have my printouts of the PLL algorithms somewhere…

Cool to learn this is the same guy.

"If you want something done quickly, give it to the busiest person."

“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”

― Bill Gates

Is it necessary for me to drink my own urine? No, but I do it anyway because it's sterile and I like the taste.

-- Patches O'Houlihan

I am Groot

-- Groot

You miss 100% of the shots you don't take

-- Wayne Gretzky -- Michael Scott

A lot of busy, smart people have seemingly random side-projects. For example, Von Neumann:

"A professor of Byzantine history at Princeton once said that von Neumann had greater expertise in Byzantine history than he did" [1]

I don't know for sure why, but I think two possibilities are likely: (1) An extremely strong, natural intellectual curiosity and/or (2) Working on other things allows them to bring fresh ideas/insights to their "main" work, and in this sense is also rejuvenating.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann

From this point of view intelligence and memory may be just like muscle: the more you use (train) it, the more is grows (performs well).

He’s smart enough to do the job he has because he has done this hobby work his whole life. See also Peter Norvig.

Probably helps his boss is the "tecnoking" and cfo is the "master of coin".

Agreed though - impressive he has that kind of sidebar time or is so capable he doesn't need that much time to figure it out.

This stuff isn't that hard to figure out, given the number of specifications and tutorials already out there. What's impressive is the fact that he thought of a reasonably sized task, and (presumably) executed it efficiently and completely without getting stuck or distracted.

I spent quite some time researching this a few years ago. Then I finally programmed and generated my own fully working address. It's quite a satisfying journey. But I have to say, Python makes this somewhat less painful than it is in JavaScript (yes, I tried that too...) xD

He started tweeting about this like months ago

I think he’s a natural teacher - someone who loves sharing what he’s learnt with others - and it pleases to me know such people exist.

Everything I learned about deep neural networks, enough to apply it in a live product, was essentially all his notes, videos and exercises. And it’s all out there for free!

Thanks Andrej and keep doing cool stuff!

I know right? I had to do a double take when I saw the link, and then had to click it to confirm it was that Karpathy

Maybe most of his job is hype & marketing without delivering much

FSD rollout has been delayed many times. He's underperforming.

This is a very cynical way of looking at development progress. Did the iPhone team underperform by shipping in 2007 instead of 2005?

He's almost certainly a 100x engineer.

Definitely saved plenty of lives already. You should watch that video from yesterday

100x means he produces 100x you (or 100x the average engineer).

Or Elon is over-performing.