PERSON
Andrej Karpathy
The engineer who named the new era of software—builder of Tesla’s Autopilot vision system and OpenAI founding member who saw, from inside the machinery, that programs were no longer written but grown, and gave the world its clearest vocabulary for what that means.
Andrej Karpathy arrived at artificial intelligence not as a philosopher asking what minds are but as an engineer asking what software is—and from that vantage he saw something the philosophers missed. Working inside Tesla’s Autopilot team, he watched handwritten C++ shrink and
neural networks swell, absorbing functionality engineers had always specified by hand. He named what he was witnessing:
Software 2.0, a change not of degree but of kind, in which the dataset becomes the source code and
gradient descent writes the logic no human will ever read. When
large language models made plain English a programming language, he extended the account to Software 3.0, and in a line that would pass into the working vocabulary of a generation he wrote that the hottest new programming language is English. His sharpest gift, though, is not coinage but calibration: he holds at once that the transformation is structural and that artificial general intelligence