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Artificial Intelligence Programming

Want to learn how to make AI/ML programs? Watch Andrej Karpathy’s AI tutorial videos.

Title card for one of Andrej Karpathy’s videos: “Let’s build GPT. From Scratch. In code. Spelled out.”

I’m trying to carve out time to work my way through Andrej Karpathy’s tutorials on his Neural Networks: Zero to Hero YouTube playlist.

At the moment, it comprises seven videos that starts with an introduction to neural networks (which “only assumes basic knowledge of Python and a vague recollection of calculus from high school”)…

…and ends with an exercise where you build a basic GPT to generate random Shakespearean dialogue:

Working on my favorite Python tool — Jupyter Notebook — Karpathy walks you step by step through the process of building an AI/ML application, explaining the “whys” along the way.

There’ve been requests for a more “slowed down” version of these videos, and I might have to take up that challenge.

Who is Andrej Karpathy?

His most recent gig was being Tesla’s director of artificial intelligence, a job he had from June 2017 until he resigned in July 2022. Before that, he founded an AI group you may have heard of: OpenAI, as in the people behind ChatGPT.

Born in 1986 in Bratislava, he and his family moved to Toronto when he was 15. He has a bachelor’s in computer science and physics from the University of Toronto, a master’s from University of British Columbia, and a PhD from Stanford, where his specialty was natural language processing and computer vision.

Want to know more about Andrej Karpathy and have a long drive or need something to listen to while working out? Check out this lengthy interview (three and half hours!), even if you do it in installments…