Interesting that back then he still had that mix of (a) is genius (or at least very smart) and (b) can and is willing to explain things in a way that is entertaining, simple, fun.

He has been a legit superstar since college. No one was surprised that he went on to do great things.

Absolutely. I wasn't saying it that way round. More that the presentation skills were as impeccable back then as they are now. Which may not be surprising but it made me happy to watch. He is one of the few "wormhole" people who understands the hard stuff, but can teach some of it to the rest of us!

P.S. username checks out.

I stumbled across ScriptBots when I was a kid, and became obsessed with implementing my own variants, and subsequently with neural networks. This one [1] is close to Karpathy's original, and this one [2] turns the world 3D and the beings are slightly more advanced. Both are implemented in MoonScript/Lua and run with Love2D. In part due to this this YouTube video, I work as a Machine Learning Engineer today.

[1] https://github.com/nilq/genesis [2] https://github.com/nilq/plane

Yes, I also became somewhat obsessed with ScriptBots when it first came out. I remember re-compiling it from source using the Intel C++ compiler and getting a pretty massive speedup on my machine. It was the first time I really dug into a fairly complex program. Even now I think it's probably too heavy to work well in JS.