Andrej Karpathy: From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering
Andrej Karpathy (co-founder of OpenAI, former head of AI at Tesla, and now founder of Eureka Labs) talks with Sequoia partner Stephanie Zhan at AI Ascent 2026 about what's changed in the year since he coined "vibe coding." He explains why he's never felt more behind as a programmer, why agentic engineering is the more serious discipline taking shape on top of vibe coding, and why we should think of LLMs not as animals but as ghosts: jagged, statistical, summoned entities that require a new kind of taste and judgment to direct. He also touches on Software 3.0, the limits of verifiability, and why you can outsource your thinking but never your understanding.
Andrej Karpathy on Code Agents, AutoResearch, and the Loopy Era of AI
What happens when AI agents can design experiments, collect data, and improve — without a human in the loop? Andrej Karpathy joins Sarah Guo on the state of models, the future of engineering and education, thinking about impact on jobs, and his project AutoResearch: where agents close the loop on a piece of AI research (experimentation, training, and optimization, autonomously).
00:00 Andrej Karpathy Introduction
02:55 What Capability Limits Remain?
06:15 What Mastery of Coding Agents Looks Like
11:16 Second Order Effects of Natural Language Coding
15:51 Why AutoResearch
22:45 Relevant Skills in the AI Era
28:25 Model Speciation
32:30 Building More Collaboration Surfaces for Humans and AI
37:28 Analysis of Jobs Market Data
48:25 Open vs. Closed Source Models
53:51 Autonomous Robotics
1:00:59 MicroGPT and Agentic Education
1:05:40 Conclusion
Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away
The Andrej Karpathy episode.
During this interview, Andrej explains why reinforcement learning is terrible (but everything else is much worse), why AGI will just blend into the previous ~2.5 centuries of 2% GDP growth, why self driving took so long to crack, and what he sees as the future of education.
It was a pleasure chatting with him.
Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.
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Timestamps
(00:00:00) – AGI is still a decade away
(00:29:45) – LLM cognitive deficits
(00:40:05) – RL is terrible
(00:49:38) – How do humans learn?
(01:06:25) – AGI will blend into 2% GDP growth
(01:17:36) – ASI
(01:32:50) – Evolution of intelligence & culture
(01:42:55) - Why self driving took so long
(01:56:20) - Future of education
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The Road to Autonomous Intelligence with Andrej Karpathy
Andrej Karpathy joins Sarah and Elad in this week of No Priors. Andrej, who was a founding team member of OpenAI and former Senior Director of AI at Tesla, needs no introduction. In this episode, Andrej discusses the evolution of self-driving cars, comparing Tesla and Waymo’s approaches, and the technical challenges ahead. They also cover Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot, the bottlenecks of AI development today, and how AI capabilities could be further integrated with human cognition. Andrej shares more about his new company Eureka Labs and his insights into AI-driven education, peer networks, and what young people should study to prepare for the reality ahead.
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Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @Karpathy
Show Notes:
(0:00) Introduction
(0:33) Evolution of self-driving cars
(2:23) The Tesla vs. Waymo approach to self-driving
(6:32) Training Optimus with automotive models
(10:26) Reasoning behind the humanoid form factor
(13:22) Existing challenges in robotics
(16:12) Bottlenecks of AI progress
(20:27) Parallels between human cognition and AI models
(22:12) Merging human cognition with AI capabilities
(27:10) Building high performance small models
(30:33) Andrej’s current work in AI-enabled education
(36:17) How AI-driven education reshapes knowledge networks and status
(41:26) Eureka Labs
(42:25) What young people study to prepare for the future
#333 – Andrej Karpathy: Tesla AI, Self-Driving, Optimus, Aliens, and AGI
Andrej Karpathy is a legendary AI researcher, engineer, and educator. He’s the former director of AI at Tesla, a founding member of OpenAI, and an educator at Stanford. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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Books mentioned:
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OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
(00:00) – Introduction
(05:41) – Neural networks
(10:45) – Biology
(16:15) – Aliens
(26:27) – Universe
(38:18) – Transformers
(46:34) – Language models
(56:45) – Bots
(1:03:05) – Google’s LaMDA
(1:10:28) – Software 2.0
(1:21:28) – Human annotation
(1:23:25) – Camera vision
(1:28:30) – Tesla’s Data Engine
(1:32:39) – Tesla Vision
(1:39:09) – Elon Musk
(1:44:17) – Autonomous driving
(1:49:11) – Leaving Tesla
(1:54:39) – Tesla’s Optimus
(2:03:45) – ImageNet
(2:06:23) – Data
(2:16:15) – Day in the life
(2:29:31) – Best IDE
(2:36:37) – arXiv
(2:41:06) – Advice for beginners
(2:50:24) – Artificial general intelligence
(3:03:44) – Movies
(3:09:37) – Future of human civilization
(3:13:56) – Book recommendations
(3:20:05) – Advice for young people
(3:21:56) – Future of machine learning
(3:28:44) – Meaning of life
Andrej Karpathy on the visionary AI in Tesla's autonomous driving
On the first ever episode of The Robot Brains podcast, our host Pieter Abbeel sits down with Andrej Karpathy, director of AI at Tesla. Andrej is a world-leading expert when it comes to machine learning and training neural nets. In this episode he talks about what it's like working with Elon Musk, training driverless cars with machine learning and the time he had to sleep on a yoga mat at Tesla HQ... Host: Pieter Abbeel. Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones. Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
