Tesla former AI Director receives innovators award for work on deep neural networks and computer vision

By Simon Alvarez

Posted on June 30, 2023

Former Tesla AI Director Andrej Karpathy was honored with the WTF Innovators Award for his contributions to the fields of deep neural networks and computer vision. The former Tesla executive was also lauded for his continued efforts to make AI more effective for humanity. 

The WTF Innovators Award aims to recognize “excellence at the precipice of societal change.” The award’s inaugural class is focused on AI innovators, and as a memento, each of the 34 awardees is gifted a featured song by artists QuHarrison Terry and Genesis Renji. Joining Karpathy are fellow AI stars like Dr. Fei-Fei Li, Kian Hooshmand, Jonas Andrulis, David Holz, and Amjad Masad, to name a few.

QuHarrison Terry, the presenter of the award, commended Karpathy for his significant research and achievements. As part of the recognition, Karpathy received a special gift in the form of a featured song titled “Andrej Slide,” which was produced by Nimso and performed by QuHarrison Terry and Genesis Renji.

Karpathy gained prominence through his pivotal role as the Senior Director of AI at Tesla, where he led the computer vision team responsible for Tesla’s autonomous driving efforts. Before his tenure at the electric vehicle maker, he served as a research scientist and founding member of OpenAI. In early 2023, he rejoined OpenAI to contribute his skills to the startup’s projects.

“Andrej Karpathy is core to developing systems that allow computers to ‘see.’ His dedication to this field of research is the reason that we’re nearing autonomous self-driving cars on the road. Now that he’s back working at OpenAI on a JARVIS-like project, I imagine that he’s working on multimodal language models and imbuing GPT with vision. He gave the world Autopilot and is now working on an intelligent assistant at OpenAI, which is why he should be on everyone’s radar,” Terry said in a press release.

Karpathy’s career in AI showed promise even before he became linked with Tesla or OpenAI. During his time as a graduate student at Stanford, Karpathy extended the techniques for developing convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which closely mimic the structure of neurons in the visual cortex. His research expanded the visual abilities of an AI system to recognize more than one object in an image, and thus comprehend what was happening in an entire scene.

Karpathy’s contributions to the field also led to the creation of Stanford’s first deep learning class, CS231n, which continues to be one of the university’s most influential courses to this day.

Listen to the “Andrej Slide” here.

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Tesla former AI Director receives innovators award for work on deep neural networks and computer vision