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.

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