Most people would give an arm and leg to work with Elon Musk, but there are some people Musk publicly requests to work with him.
Elon Musk has asked Andrej Karpathy, the former Sr Director of AI at Tesla, to work together again. Karpathy had reposted Tesla’s video showing off its new diner in LA. “Love this! Supercharger, diner, … but really a kind of exhibit for the future. Plotting a road trip SF -> LA to charge Shadowfax,” Karpathy wrote on X.
Elon Musk not only reshared Karpathy’s post, but put in a reply of his own. “Andrej, my long lost brother, let us work together again!” Musk wrote.
Now Musk doesn’t usually ask potential hires to work together on X, but Andrej Karpathy is no ordinary hire. Andrej Karpathy had worked on computer vision with AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li. When Musk had founded OpenAI in 2015 along with Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, Andrej Karpathy had been one of the founding members However, he had left OpenAI in 2017, and joined Tesla. At Tesla, Karpathy worked on Tesla’s self-driving program, and became its Senior Director of AI.
In 2022, Karpathy left Tesla, and returned to OpenAI for a year. In 2024, Karpathy announced that he was founding his own startup in the education space name Eureka Labs, which would use AI for better educational outcomes.
Andrej Karpathy isn’t only one of the sharpest technical minds in AI, but he also has the unique ability to translate AI to non-technical people. Karpathy had produced a series of lectures explaining how LLMs work on YouTube which have millions of views, and has even shown how to build a mini LLM from scratch. Karpathy also seems to understand how AI will impact technology and the world — he was amongst the first few people to declare that the “hottest new programming language is English”, and had also coined the term Vibe Coding, which has become all the rage in recent months. Karpathy has also given talks in which he’s brought up concepts like Software 3.0, and described how software will change with AI. And Elon Musk asking him to work together is a testament to how Karpathy doesn’t only have plenty of fans online, but is also held in exceedingly high regard by some of the biggest founders and CEOs in AI.