If you don’t know who Andrej Karpathy is, here’s the short version: he was a founding member of OpenAI, ran AI at Tesla, and now runs his own AI education company. The dude is a literal legend in the space.
He just dropped a 3.5 hour video called “Deep Dive into LLMs like ChatGPT” and it’s free on YouTube.
Here’s why it actually matters for us:
Most of us are out here vibe coding, prompting, building stuff, and hoping it works. When it breaks, we don’t really know why. We just try a different prompt and pray.
This video fixes that.
It’s not about prompts. It’s not about tricks. It’s about understanding the actual machine you’re talking to every single day.
He covers:
• How these models actually learn (pretraining)
• Why ChatGPT hallucinates and what to do about it
• Tool use, memory, and how the model “thinks”
• Why models are weirdly good at hard stuff and weirdly bad at simple stuff (he calls it “jagged intelligence”)
• RLHF, AlphaGo, DeepSeek, the whole stack
The reason I’m pushing this so hard: if you understand even the basics of what’s happening under the hood, your prompts get sharper, your debugging gets faster, and you stop being surprised when Claude messes up the same thing 3 times in a row.
You don’t need to be technical. He literally made it for a general audience.
Watch it once just to take it in. Watch it twice to actually start applying it.
If you’re serious about going from vibe coder to actual builder, this is one of the single best free resource I’ve seen this year.