No Priors Ep. 80 | With Andrej Karpathy from OpenAI and Tesla

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. Email feedback to show@ Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @Karpathy 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