Andrej Karpathy joins Sarah and Elad in this week of No Priors. Andrej, who was a founding team member of OpenAI and the former Tesla Autopilot leader, needs no introduction. In this episode, Andrej discusses the evolution of self-driving cars, comparing Tesla's 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 mission Eureka Labs and his insights into AI-driven education and what young people should study to prepare for the reality ahead.Sign up for new podcasts every week.
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
