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Karpathy's free ChatGPT video has 10M views. Here's why he gives it all away

In February 2025, Andrej Karpathy uploaded a three-and-a-half-hour video called "Deep Dive into LLMs like ChatGPT". It explains, from the ground up, how a chatbot like ChatGPT is built. It has now been watched more than

In February 2025, Andrej Karpathy uploaded a three-and-a-half-hour video called "Deep Dive into LLMs like ChatGPT". It explains, from the ground up, how a chatbot like ChatGPT is built. It has now been watched more than 10 million times. It costs nothing.

It isn't a one-off. His "Let's build GPT" lecture has over 8 million views, and his code for training small GPT models has tens of thousands of stars on GitHub. All of it is free.

So why does one of the most sought-after AI researchers alive keep giving his best work away? He has answered that himself. The answer is less about generosity than about a fear he has for all of us.

Who he is

  • Born in Bratislava, then part of Czechoslovakia. In his words: "my family moved to Toronto when I was 15."
  • University of Toronto: "This is where I first got into deep learning, attending Geoff Hinton's class and reading groups."
  • Stanford PhD with Fei-Fei Li. There he "designed and was the primary instructor for the first deep learning class Stanford - CS 231n". It grew from 150 students in 2015 to 750 in 2017.
  • December 2015: named as one of OpenAI's founding members in its launch post.
  • 2017 to 2022: Director of AI at Tesla, leading Autopilot's computer vision. When he left, he wrote that Autopilot had "graduated from lane keeping to city streets" in those five years.
  • February 2023: back at OpenAI ("I am joining OpenAI (again :))"). He left again in February 2024.
  • July 2024: started Eureka Labs, "an AI+Education company".
  • February 2025: coined "vibe coding". Collins Dictionary made it its Word of the Year 2025.
  • May 2026: joined Anthropic to work on pretraining research.

His second spell at OpenAI included its strangest week. In November 2023 the board fired Sam Altman. Two days later, Karpathy posted:

"I like and respect Sam and I think so does the majority of OpenAI. The board had a chance to explain their drastic actions and they did not take it, so there is nothing to go on except exactly what it looks like."

Within days, Altman was back as CEO.

The free teacher

Karpathy's YouTube channel has 1.76 million subscribers. His "Neural Networks: Zero to Hero" series is eight lectures. It starts with "building micrograd" (4.5 million views), a tiny engine that computes gradients, and works up to building a GPT yourself.

His code follows the same idea: small enough to read in one sitting. Stars as of November 13, 2026:

Repo What it is Stars
nanoGPT The simplest code to train a mid-sized GPT 64,700
nanochat A "little ChatGPT clone that you can kind of talk to", trained for about $100 60,500
autoresearch AI agents that run training experiments overnight 100,000

In February 2026 he went further: microgpt, "a single file of 200 lines of pure Python with no dependencies that trains and inferences a GPT". His note on it: "I cannot simplify this any further."

He's not a cheerleader

The person teaching millions how these models work is also one of the most quoted sober voices on what they can't do. Dates matter here, because his view has moved.

October 2025, on the Dwarkesh Podcast, asked why you wouldn't hire an AI agent as an intern today:

"They're cognitively lacking and it's just not working."

His forecast: "this is more accurately described as the decade of agents." Not the year. On how the industry was presenting coding agents, he was blunter:

"I feel like the industry is making too big of a jump and is trying to pretend like this is amazing, and it's not. It's slop."

In the same answer: "The models are amazing. They still need a lot of work."

January 2026, after weeks of coding with agents, he described going "from about 80% manual+autocomplete coding and 20% agents in November to 80% agent coding and 20% edits+touchups in December". Then he admitted something few people at his level would:

"I've already noticed that I am slowly starting to atrophy my ability to write code manually."

His advice in the same post: "if you have any code you actually care about I would watch them like a hawk".

The man who coined "vibe coding" also wrote, in that very first post, that it's "not too bad for throwaway weekend projects". The limit was there from day one.

His biggest fear

On the podcast, he was asked why he chose education over AI research at a lab. His answer:

"My personal big fear is that a lot of this stuff happens on the side of humanity, and that humanity gets disempowered by it."

And then, more concretely:

"I'm most afraid of something depicted in movies like WALL-E or Idiocracy or something like that, where humanity is on the side of this stuff."

In WALL-E, people drift through life in hover chairs while machines run everything. In Idiocracy, the future simply got dumber. Karpathy's fear isn't killer robots. It's a world where AI keeps getting better and people stop understanding any of it.

He doesn't soften it: "If this is false and I'm wrong and we end up in a WALL-E or Idiocracy future, then I don't even care if there are Dyson spheres. This is a terrible outcome."

So the free lectures aren't charity. They're his plan. People who understand the machines don't get sidelined by them. Even when he joined Anthropic in May 2026, he wrote: "I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time."

What builders can take from it

We use coding agents every day, so three things from him hit home:

  1. Learn it by building it small. micrograd, nanoGPT, microgpt. If you can read the whole thing, you understand it, and you can debug what an agent writes for you.
  2. Watch the agent on code you care about. His words, not ours: "like a hawk".
  3. Keep some skills manual on purpose. If the person who named vibe coding noticed his own skills fading, the rest of us will too.

In his words, the future he wants:

"I want humans to be much, much better in this future. To me, this is through education that you can achieve this."

We made a short video on his story:

Sources

Cover photo: Gladwin Analytics, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Logit Solutions AI is an AI product studio. We design, build and support production-ready AI products for startups and growing businesses.

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