How did Andrej Karpathy become a rockstar?
His thesis is good, but not extraordinary. How did he have such a meteorite rise to become head of AI at Tesla just an year after phd?
Meteorites don’t rise and corporate execs aren’t rockstars
Have to follow this one. I've talked to and heard him few times, and he's got the risk taking mentality, out of the box thinking and certainly doesn't fit the mould, which lots of academics tend to do.
:0 are you some kind of commercial
Have you talked to him? The guy may not be the best mathematician around, but he has broad vision. Which is uncommon in academia. It doesn't mean that because he's head of AI in Tesla, he's a rock star researcher. It means that he's good at directing corporate department and product directions.
Stanford has extraordinary PR machinery. It also has deep tentacles into the bay area tech industry. If you are a Stanford PhD student the machinery sets you up pretty well.
This too.
You don’t need to be a PhD student, Elizabeth Holmes smashed that glass ceiling
Salesmanship
Exactly. Combined with theoretical knowledge, is pretty rare.
How did he sell or advertise himself?
By being good with Twitter.
Why does Tesla need AI? And did something useful come out of Tesla's AI org?
Self driving cars?
Auto pilot =/= self driving.
All salesmanship, very little actual skill. He'd be a decent T5 research scientist at Google or Facebook, but nothing more than that. He did not help in Deep Learning resurgence and only jumped on the bandwagon a year or two after it took off. During his Ph.D. he published about a couple of decent papers on automated captioning systems, but I don't recall them being anything mindblowing. And that was it... He went to OpenAI, didn't do shit there, and then joined Tesla. How? Because throughout his mediocre career he kept making blog posts and open-sourcing the Stanford course that he co-taught, all of which became very popular. He did amazing work teaching Deep Learning, but there's very little technical skill about him.
this guy thinks that if you're an amazing teacher you don't have amazing technical skill - the real noob over here
Head of AI sounds like a PR thing
What do people get out of bashing others? Karpathy is extremely influencial in his research: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=l8WuQJgAAAAJ&hl=en Most profs can't hold a candle to his research influence over the course of their career, let alone matching it in 6 years.
It’s more a reaction to the [overhype / cult of personality / groupthink / Blind worship / etc], which is very dangerous and leads to things like Bernie Madoff, Elizabeth Holmes, Marissa Mayer, Juicero, Sundar/Ruth, etc.
There is nothing over hyped about peer reviewed publications. It is a reflection of the true value of those contributions. And Tesla is leading in autonomous driving race in many respects. Please show some respect for someone who is actually busy changing the world.
I guess you need to be socially famous. It's less about the actual PhD work.
How does one become socially famous during his PhD?
Same way everyone in AI gets famous: make a bunch of online AI lectures.