---
type: entity
title: "Andrej Karpathy"
entity_type: person
role: "AI researcher, educator, founder"
first_mentioned: "[[LLM Wiki Pattern]]"
created: 2026-04-07
updated: 2026-04-07
tags:
  - entity
  - person
  - ai-researcher
status: mature
related:
  - "[[LLM Wiki Pattern]]"
  - "[[Compounding Knowledge]]"
  - "[[entities/_index]]"
sources:
---

# Andrej Karpathy

AI researcher and educator. Former Director of AI at Tesla, founding member of OpenAI. Known for deep learning education (Neural Networks: Zero to Hero series, micrograd, nanoGPT) and for publishing practical AI patterns.

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## Key Contributions to This Wiki

Karpathy originated the [[LLM Wiki Pattern]] — the idea of using LLMs to build and maintain a persistent, compounding knowledge base rather than re-deriving knowledge from raw documents on every query.

He published the idea as an "idea file" — intentionally abstract, designed to be copy-pasted into a Claude Code or similar session and built out collaboratively. The cosmic-brain plugin is a production implementation of this pattern.

His framing: "The wiki is a persistent, compounding artifact. The cross-references are already there. The contradictions have already been flagged. The synthesis already reflects everything you've read."

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## Notable Quote

"I thought that I had to reach for fancy RAG, but the LLM has been pretty good at auto-maintaining index files and brief summaries of all documents and reads all the important related data fairly easily at this small scale."

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## Connections

- [[LLM Wiki Pattern]] — his core contribution to knowledge management
- [[Compounding Knowledge]] — the central insight he articulated
- cosmic-brain plugin — this repo is a production implementation of his pattern
