Karpathy is probably one of the biggest names in AI, I do wonder where he fits now. He's sort of bounced around Tesla back to OpenAI back to independent. He sort of left OpenAI before it really hit the inflection point, and he was at Tesla for a long time and they didn't really deliver what they wanted on the AI side. Now he's bounced around a few places. I understand that the leaders in this market play this silly game of trying to buy up the names like trading cards but I wonder what this turns into.
i wouldn't be surprised if he just becomes a glorified marketer for anthro.
im also going to guess that whatever research he does would be free roam research that primarily serves to market the fact that claude was able to help perform the research.
the visible stuff he's been working on has been mostly agent soft skills. off the top of my head is autoresearch and his the wiki knowledge stuff. nothing particularly groundbreaking, but has helped devs expand their understanding of the utility that these models can provide.
No it doesn’t? It matches his skills to the lab’s needs. Karpathy is a media personality, manager, and educator far more than he is a hands-on researcher.
I don’t think it does. I think it’s better phrased that he is marketing rather than a marketer. He can do whatever he wants to do, in return Anthropic gets to say “hey, this guy works with us!”
oh my, i see what youre saying. at this point youd hope everyone has realized that the best way to keep models more reliable is to force them to stay honest via very very string static typing as a feedback loop. bags of text with hyperlinks certainly fail that measure
I don't know anything about this person, but want to point out that renown and validation is something that most (all?) humans crave. That doesn't make them dumb or desperate, it makes them normal.
Generally, when a "good" developer has a huge public presence and reputation, that's quite valuable to a company when they're competing in a tough space. Many a time, more so than the (very high) technical skill of the developer in question.
I've seen large funded companies gather good popular developers like pokemon cards and just have them go around give talks and write blog posts. It creates an aura around them which makes things like hiring, fund raising etc. much easier.
So, it's not really a statement about Karpathy himself. It's more about the company hiring him.
Andrej is a smart guy. You don't get into Stanford for grad school without that.
But he has always been known for his communication rather than his research. He got famous by putting out a (very well made) course on machine learning that was available to the public. Since graduating he hasn't exactly delivered on revolutionary new stuff at the businesses that employed him but he has continued to be extremely good at communicating thoughts about the current and future state of AI. Businesses want that and he knows that he can deliver that.
He already stated his motivation a few months ago in an interview with Dwarkesh - basically saying that he might join one of the big labs, for a while, to keep in touch with frontier research.
Andrej seems like a great guy, but him joining Anthropic feels a bit like a transactional relationship (old guy marries hot young chick). Anthropic get a "glorified marketer", and he gets a first row seat at SOTA LLM dev 2026. I don't think they hired him expecting he's going to change the direction/pace of their research.
> That implies Karpathy is either dumb or desperate
This kind of thing happens to big names in software all the time. Carmack going to Facebook is a prime example - he joined with the idea of using all those resources to build world-changing tech, and instead he ended up headlining conferences, and fighting a losing battle against the corporate types who were put in charge of Oculus.
I think you are underestimating both the value of both projects (autoresearch and personal wiki) just because they are simple. I see both POCs for continuous learning / optmization on the harness layer, which in my opinion is a very interesting direction.
I think Andrej has the experience (and now ressources) to productionize their research into something very interesting.
No, these are developed off of the assumed uses of the models (predictive autofiller) rather than their actual, cognitive and potential industrial use (developing large scale frameworks for industrial production, automating systems that normally require human monitoring), and uses that we have not yet discovered, because we have not figured out all the constraints and limitations of these models. If Karpathy was in the game like he used to be, he would be on real product. Right now he’s probably so lost by the very thing he helped create that he is stuck doing these mini projects for his own personal interest, without anyone really critically engaging with his work.
I mean, you would think that all those people he killed as the person in charge of deploying knowingly dangerously defective self-driving software for profit would have had a impact. But executives seem to just skate on killing customers to line their own pockets these days. Just "following orders" I guess.
Yes, he was [1] director of AI and Autopilot Vision at Tesla, directly poached and reporting to Elon Musk on the most important headline feature of Tesla directly managed by Elon Musk.
He had both the technical and executive authority to determine if the product was fit for customer usage. He had direct executive responsibility for the product on the road between 2017-2022.
If he, the lead architect and executive responsible felt the product was dangerous and then he was overridden, he can not get away with claiming he was “just following orders”, he had a moral duty to not sign-off or quit otherwise he is clearly complicit in deploying a dangerous product for his own self-enrichment.
When people talk about engineering ethics, this is literally a completely uncontroversial textbook example. The only way you accept this is if you do not want ethics in engineering.
Idk. I read this as a bad sign for Anthropic. OpenAI’s hiring recently has been much stronger, the guys have actual taste. I don’t know Karpathy personally, I won’t speak bad about a man I don’t know.
Regardless of what Anthropic’s share price is, OpenAI has been fucking killing it recently. I don’t take particular pleasure in saying that.
Edit: My lens is meritocratic. My experience is as an extremely heavy user of both company’s full suite of products in the range of 5 digits per month. My interest is better products not hype.
Dude, both! Codex is going to eat Openclaw… i don’t love saying that.
What codex is a few steps away from doing is changing fundamentally a lot of workflows.
Remote codex with their computer use is basically you at your computer doing things, 24/7.
Then they added gpt images 2.0
what codex can do, in a few more iterations of codex, is show you visually side by side “would you prefer this (A) or that (B)” in a series of questions. This is what some open source researchers have been up to. That’s no longer guessing.
I’m not trying to hype a company i have no stake in, but they’ve been killing it.
It feels like these companies are constantly going back and forth on who has the best product constantly. It's such a dynamic time with how fast they are both working.
Out here in the actual demonstrated world, OpenAI has been leaking quality people like a sieve, has not yet demonstrated anything remotely similar to 'taste', and is led by a sociopath (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may...), so I think you can rest easy.
>OpenAI’s hiring recently has been much stronger, the guys have actual taste.
Can you cite specifics? "I won't speak bad about someone, but also won't speak good about others" resulted in a comment that seems to contribute nothing
Some people are good at developing the sciences. Others are good at developing commercial products.
And tesla is not a good place for science development. Tesla is structured from narcissistic mindset: results driven, cynical, and position-based. This doesn’t bode well for long term sciences.
His goal could simply be to learn SOTA architectures.
When rumors started that GPT-4 design would be kept secret, he likely wanted to know what architecture it would be. Perhaps he left Tesla, waited out the non-compete clause, and joined OpenAI to learn its details.
When Mythos dropped, there were hints that it had a new architecture. He might similarly want to know how it works.
Either way, there is enough cross-lab hiring that those secrets eventually get known, but only by the labs.
Or they collude by hiring each others engineers as a way to create manageable competition and information sharing outside their fiduciary duty to shareholders.
Agreed! OpenAI even bought TBPN [1], who many have equated to ESPN for business. I think that even if Karpathy didn't add any new ideas to Anthropic (unlikely), adding him to the team is an interesting message to give to the market
Maybe he adds some semblance of stability? Anthropic probably is trying to sell it itself as the sane alternative to OpenAI with their IPO coming up choose us we are responsible.
At least in this case we're talking about someone doing something useful and providing tons of value to the field, not about people being praised for starting a company and raising money.
But with the financial community, some semblance of stability is always important particularly with an IPO coming up. Choose us we don’t have a sideshow going on with Elon like the other guys, OpenAI.
Andrej Karpathy - @karpathy
Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.
May 19, 2026 · 3:05 PM UTC
Funny. He foreshadowed this in a recent interview. Saying that he may fall out of touch with evolving approaches and if any of the frontier labs would have him, he’d be interested.
We are in the early stages of AI. Anthropic is Altavista and OpenAI is AskJeeves or something. 10-20 years from now the scene will be unrecognizable and all of this will be inconsequential but at the same time it is the fondation on which tomorrow is built.
And then regulatory capture it to death. Seriously, Anthropic is top notch in their coding models, but they are not the good guys in the tech vs. product for humanity's sake debate.
Which is funny because Anthropic is the SOTA that the DoD has been using for more than 2 years. They already have blood on their hands with helping the Iran attack. He joined it
I wonder what will happen with EurekaLabs now. I checked their X account, but the posts are now restricted. However, the background picture... that old AI-generated image feels surprisingly cringe (https://x.com/EurekaLabsAI/header_photo), incredible how much GenAI has improved since that image was created.
We can expect more "vibe coding", "summoning ghosts" like expressions in the future now officially from Anthropic. I need him to add more videos to his channel on agentic coding. Looks like that won't happen anytime soon.
Karpathy is a terrific communicator and populariser of the LLM landscape, and I do hope this isn't going to mean his work in that regard now gets dropped, or dropped into a private Anthropic-only void.
Seems to me that you need incredible amounts of money to be competitive in the frontier model arena. I don't know how much money Karpathy has to spend, but I'd imagine that the money needed would almost certainly mean investors with deep pockets.
And then there's the uncertainty, will the AI "wars" be some winner-takes-all situation? Will the smaller labs eventually be acquired by the bigger ones, will they simply wash away if there's a crash?
I don't know. If you can land some exceptional gig at the big firms, maybe the financials are good enough to not start your own lab. Minimizing risk, and all that.
EDIT: Assuming such a startup would focus on frontier models.
> you need incredible amounts of money to be competitive in the frontier model arena
This is my assumption.
> there's the uncertainty, will the AI "wars" be some winner-takes-all situation? Will the smaller labs eventually be acquired by the bigger ones, will they simply wash away if there's a crash?
He's Andrej Karpathy. He could wait to let the winner surface. Obviously better to get in with the winner earlier. But worse to get on the wrong team versus on the right team late.
Two years ago I’d agree, now he probably wants access to the immense capacity they have where if he were to start a lab from zero now, the ramp up to frontier pushing would require a lot more time. I don’t he needs the money as it is, and wherever he were to go would certainly make it worthwhile financially. Some people may just be cool with a couple hundred million dollars in their lifetime
It’s not enough to have unique ideas. You need capital, compute, people, distribution, customers… There’s huge appeal to joining a place that has all those things and lets you pursue your unique ideas without worrying about all that.
Karpathy's career arc feels similar to Jim Keller's; a butterfly flitting from one flower to another, gathering experiences and creating magic everywhere they go.
I have been impressed by some of his work, especially on the vulgarisation and simplification. Excellent communicator and engineer. But I am a bit more skeptical about his taste and vision.
Leaving OpenAI to work for Elon Musk was a poor move, and AFAIK his work on CV at Tesla did not bring anything groundbreaking, unfortunately probably the opposite (the bet on camera-only driven system did not pay off) and his talks about the approach would indicate that his whole idea to make it work was nothing more than hill-climbing.
Also, his over-reaction to the whole Claw thing was a bit ridiculous, in my opinion.
I don't see him as a Scientist in the field, but more as an efficient tinkerer.
i think his “fame” in the past few years has been creating teaching materials, projects, etc with lots of nuanced informative takes around the LLM space
Not about money, but knowledge. The frontier of the field is no longer accessible through arXiv or research papers only.
One thing is that the companies are holding on because of competitive advantage, and I think another is that AI is such a politically polarizing topic that actually being open about everything is risky for the companies, wanting to avoid controversy.
I worked for MS and Apple for 20 years and heard that opinion constantly; i.e., "People only work there for the money."
I have no idea if Andrej "sold out" but perhaps he realizes that if he wants to work on the cutting edge alongside talented people, with a seemingly endless budget, Anthropic is a good choice.
I chose my employers for the same reason; the compensation was secondary.
MS and Apple. Infinite resources, plenty of smart people that consider compensation to be secondary (I remain skeptical, but choose to entertain the idea nonetheless), and the software output is incredibly, unbelievably, comically bad.
There's some poetry there that I am unable to capture with words.
Great communicator. It’s sad that he had joined a closed llm org. I would have expected him to join forces with someone else releasing open-source models rivaling chinese model landscape. Capital always accumulates to the capital holder in capitalism :)
Come on, he definitely has more money than he needs given his past employers. For someone with his creative output, he probably just enjoys having an environment to build and explore.
No, money is not the only barrier to building things. I think karoathy could build his own lab if he wanted, but it would be years of doing things he doesn’t want. Why waste time running a business when he’d rather be researching?
The overhead of maintaining and running things isn't interesting to most creative folk. They'd rather others deal with the minutiae (managing a company, etc) so they can focus on their thing.
Pretty big talent win for Anthropic. Karpathy is one of those people who was working on AI before it became "a thing," and he's definitely both a thought leader and influential practitioner today.
Not exactly .. he was at the forefront of computer vision (CNNs, image captioning) for a while during the ImageNet era, then joined OpenAI in 2015 but left for Tesla in 2017 before they released GPT-1. During Karpathy's time at OpenAI they were still working on games. He left Tesla in 2022, briefly rejoining OpenAI, but this was after OpenAI had already released ChatGPT (GPT-3.5), so he missed the first hand experience of the whole AI=LLM explosion.
Karpathy is probably one of the biggest names in AI, I do wonder where he fits now. He's sort of bounced around Tesla back to OpenAI back to independent. He sort of left OpenAI before it really hit the inflection point, and he was at Tesla for a long time and they didn't really deliver what they wanted on the AI side. Now he's bounced around a few places. I understand that the leaders in this market play this silly game of trying to buy up the names like trading cards but I wonder what this turns into.
i wouldn't be surprised if he just becomes a glorified marketer for anthro.
im also going to guess that whatever research he does would be free roam research that primarily serves to market the fact that claude was able to help perform the research.
the visible stuff he's been working on has been mostly agent soft skills. off the top of my head is autoresearch and his the wiki knowledge stuff. nothing particularly groundbreaking, but has helped devs expand their understanding of the utility that these models can provide.
not a diss to andrej i know he's reading this now
> just becomes a glorified marketer
That implies Karpathy is either dumb or desperate and he is neither of those by a long shot.
i mean he did publicly openly solicit interest to work at a frontier lab so he can be closer to what's going on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwSVtQ7dziU&t=2870s
No it doesn’t? It matches his skills to the lab’s needs. Karpathy is a media personality, manager, and educator far more than he is a hands-on researcher.
Being a singular influencer in this space, at this time, may be more valuable than a lot of successful VC-backed startups over the last few decades.
I don’t think it does. I think it’s better phrased that he is marketing rather than a marketer. He can do whatever he wants to do, in return Anthropic gets to say “hey, this guy works with us!”
Different people have different wants and needs. It's perfectly reasonable to work on some interesting projects and to be something of a figurehead.
> https://gist.github.com/karpathy/442a6bf555914893e9891c11519...
Last thing I saw Karpathy talk about was this, which I find hard to believe that it came from a smart person.
oh my, i see what youre saying. at this point youd hope everyone has realized that the best way to keep models more reliable is to force them to stay honest via very very string static typing as a feedback loop. bags of text with hyperlinks certainly fail that measure
I love how a ton of the replies after it are "I built exactly this with an LLM", even using his name in the repo.
Greedy is enough. Neither dumb nor desperate needed for this.
I don't know anything about this person, but want to point out that renown and validation is something that most (all?) humans crave. That doesn't make them dumb or desperate, it makes them normal.
I don't think that's the parents implication.
Generally, when a "good" developer has a huge public presence and reputation, that's quite valuable to a company when they're competing in a tough space. Many a time, more so than the (very high) technical skill of the developer in question.
I've seen large funded companies gather good popular developers like pokemon cards and just have them go around give talks and write blog posts. It creates an aura around them which makes things like hiring, fund raising etc. much easier.
So, it's not really a statement about Karpathy himself. It's more about the company hiring him.
Andrej is a smart guy. You don't get into Stanford for grad school without that.
But he has always been known for his communication rather than his research. He got famous by putting out a (very well made) course on machine learning that was available to the public. Since graduating he hasn't exactly delivered on revolutionary new stuff at the businesses that employed him but he has continued to be extremely good at communicating thoughts about the current and future state of AI. Businesses want that and he knows that he can deliver that.
Anyone who would voluntarily work for Musk when he went obviously has things going on that aren't great.
He already stated his motivation a few months ago in an interview with Dwarkesh - basically saying that he might join one of the big labs, for a while, to keep in touch with frontier research.
Andrej seems like a great guy, but him joining Anthropic feels a bit like a transactional relationship (old guy marries hot young chick). Anthropic get a "glorified marketer", and he gets a first row seat at SOTA LLM dev 2026. I don't think they hired him expecting he's going to change the direction/pace of their research.
> That implies Karpathy is either dumb or desperate
This kind of thing happens to big names in software all the time. Carmack going to Facebook is a prime example - he joined with the idea of using all those resources to build world-changing tech, and instead he ended up headlining conferences, and fighting a losing battle against the corporate types who were put in charge of Oculus.
I think you are underestimating both the value of both projects (autoresearch and personal wiki) just because they are simple. I see both POCs for continuous learning / optmization on the harness layer, which in my opinion is a very interesting direction.
I think Andrej has the experience (and now ressources) to productionize their research into something very interesting.
No, these are developed off of the assumed uses of the models (predictive autofiller) rather than their actual, cognitive and potential industrial use (developing large scale frameworks for industrial production, automating systems that normally require human monitoring), and uses that we have not yet discovered, because we have not figured out all the constraints and limitations of these models. If Karpathy was in the game like he used to be, he would be on real product. Right now he’s probably so lost by the very thing he helped create that he is stuck doing these mini projects for his own personal interest, without anyone really critically engaging with his work.
> i know he's reading this now
meanwhile in the real world:
expectation: in the real world the CLI will be replaced by an agent prompt and to get to the shell you'll have to ask 'get me bash dammit'
DevRel or whatever we call that now
> He sort of left OpenAI before it really hit the inflection point
Sorry I'm out of the loop... What inflection point are you referring to?
The inflection is Right before its meteoric rise.
GPT-1 presumably, which was released a year after he left. Prior to focusing on GPT, OpenAI was pursuing a lot of research directions.
Karpathy left OpenAI in 2017 for Tesla, came back from Tesla in 2023 and left again in 2024.
So pretty sure the original poster is talking about 2017.
I mean, you would think that all those people he killed as the person in charge of deploying knowingly dangerously defective self-driving software for profit would have had a impact. But executives seem to just skate on killing customers to line their own pockets these days. Just "following orders" I guess.
He deployed, not just developed?
Yes, he was [1] director of AI and Autopilot Vision at Tesla, directly poached and reporting to Elon Musk on the most important headline feature of Tesla directly managed by Elon Musk.
He had both the technical and executive authority to determine if the product was fit for customer usage. He had direct executive responsibility for the product on the road between 2017-2022.
If he, the lead architect and executive responsible felt the product was dangerous and then he was overridden, he can not get away with claiming he was “just following orders”, he had a moral duty to not sign-off or quit otherwise he is clearly complicit in deploying a dangerous product for his own self-enrichment.
When people talk about engineering ethics, this is literally a completely uncontroversial textbook example. The only way you accept this is if you do not want ethics in engineering.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/20/tesla-hires-deep-learning-...
I don't the comp sci has the same requirements for ethics coursework like mechanical, aerospace, etc..
Idk. I read this as a bad sign for Anthropic. OpenAI’s hiring recently has been much stronger, the guys have actual taste. I don’t know Karpathy personally, I won’t speak bad about a man I don’t know.
Regardless of what Anthropic’s share price is, OpenAI has been fucking killing it recently. I don’t take particular pleasure in saying that.
Edit: My lens is meritocratic. My experience is as an extremely heavy user of both company’s full suite of products in the range of 5 digits per month. My interest is better products not hype.
really - what am i missing?
It just feels like more hype instead of product focus.
Example 1, just from top of my mind, Composer 2.5 released today. Go look at their benchmark.
Composer 2.5 and Opus 4.7 ranked around the same, meanwhile gpt-5.5 was miles ahead.
You wouldn’t have caught me dead using a gpt model 2 years ago
Curious what you mean by killing it? Products? Model quality?
Dude, both! Codex is going to eat Openclaw… i don’t love saying that.
What codex is a few steps away from doing is changing fundamentally a lot of workflows.
Remote codex with their computer use is basically you at your computer doing things, 24/7.
Then they added gpt images 2.0
what codex can do, in a few more iterations of codex, is show you visually side by side “would you prefer this (A) or that (B)” in a series of questions. This is what some open source researchers have been up to. That’s no longer guessing.
I’m not trying to hype a company i have no stake in, but they’ve been killing it.
Codex and openclaw are both "owned" by openai, and most of the features have been in claude code for awhile now.
To be fair, Claude Dispatch was really cool. I had to wait a good 3 weeks for Codex to come out with remote
It feels like these companies are constantly going back and forth on who has the best product constantly. It's such a dynamic time with how fast they are both working.
Out here in the actual demonstrated world, OpenAI has been leaking quality people like a sieve, has not yet demonstrated anything remotely similar to 'taste', and is led by a sociopath (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may...), so I think you can rest easy.
>OpenAI’s hiring recently has been much stronger, the guys have actual taste.
Can you cite specifics? "I won't speak bad about someone, but also won't speak good about others" resulted in a comment that seems to contribute nothing
I judge them from a meritocratic lens.
A hyped name means nothing to me, how will Karpathy make Claude Code better?
I’m super happy seeing a small product manager like Tibo fucking crushing it on Codex
OpenAI seems to be dumping a LOT of money into marketing on social media at least.
I’ve been using Claude and Codex extremely heavily and use adblockers so I don’t see them
Some people are good at developing the sciences. Others are good at developing commercial products.
And tesla is not a good place for science development. Tesla is structured from narcissistic mindset: results driven, cynical, and position-based. This doesn’t bode well for long term sciences.
I dont see how he could be helping anthropic
His goal could simply be to learn SOTA architectures.
When rumors started that GPT-4 design would be kept secret, he likely wanted to know what architecture it would be. Perhaps he left Tesla, waited out the non-compete clause, and joined OpenAI to learn its details.
When Mythos dropped, there were hints that it had a new architecture. He might similarly want to know how it works.
Either way, there is enough cross-lab hiring that those secrets eventually get known, but only by the labs.
Or they collude by hiring each others engineers as a way to create manageable competition and information sharing outside their fiduciary duty to shareholders.
AI news and ESPN feels interchangeable sometimes.
Agreed! OpenAI even bought TBPN [1], who many have equated to ESPN for business. I think that even if Karpathy didn't add any new ideas to Anthropic (unlikely), adding him to the team is an interesting message to give to the market
[1] https://openai.com/index/openai-acquires-tbpn/
Maybe he adds some semblance of stability? Anthropic probably is trying to sell it itself as the sane alternative to OpenAI with their IPO coming up choose us we are responsible.
I’ve never seen names be big in the industry in this way before. It used to be founders, now it’s personalities.
At least in this case we're talking about someone doing something useful and providing tons of value to the field, not about people being praised for starting a company and raising money.
I'll reserve judgement until I've heard what ThePrimeagen and simonw have to say about this.
But you won't be stuck in Bristol, CT covering AI news.
Wouldn't be surprised if companies with too much "superstar" talent suffer from the same issues as sport teams usually do.
At least with sports teams they entertain me and I can be a fan. For "X person joins Y company" I don't have a reason to care.
But with the financial community, some semblance of stability is always important particularly with an IPO coming up. Choose us we don’t have a sideshow going on with Elon like the other guys, OpenAI.
I’m the opposite.
My “entertainment”, or intrigue, comes from the ability to impact my life.
Other people sporting struggles to catch my attention longer than the play itself, for that reason.
relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIZt9YPAPZo
That's exactly where my mind went. ~113 comments at the time of writing to discuss an announcement that a guy is starting a new job.
https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/2056753169888334312
Funny. He foreshadowed this in a recent interview. Saying that he may fall out of touch with evolving approaches and if any of the frontier labs would have him, he’d be interested.
https://youtu.be/kwSVtQ7dziU?t=47m50s
Someone at Anthropic watched and lit a fire.
We are in the early stages of AI. Anthropic is Altavista and OpenAI is AskJeeves or something. 10-20 years from now the scene will be unrecognizable and all of this will be inconsequential but at the same time it is the fondation on which tomorrow is built.
Karpathy is talented and to me he always seemed like someone who would be against building something like skynet. Anthropic is lucky to have him.
Honestly, if Skynet were possible, Anthropic would probably build it first and claim they had to because OpenAI is bad.
Anthropic has drawn lines with the most powerful organization in the world, that OpenAI capitulated on within hours for a small contract.
And then regulatory capture it to death. Seriously, Anthropic is top notch in their coding models, but they are not the good guys in the tech vs. product for humanity's sake debate.
Which is funny because Anthropic is the SOTA that the DoD has been using for more than 2 years. They already have blood on their hands with helping the Iran attack. He joined it
Good for him. His learning materials are unmatched, but I don’t think there was a viable path with his educational company.
I wonder what will happen with EurekaLabs now. I checked their X account, but the posts are now restricted. However, the background picture... that old AI-generated image feels surprisingly cringe (https://x.com/EurekaLabsAI/header_photo), incredible how much GenAI has improved since that image was created.
We can expect more "vibe coding", "summoning ghosts" like expressions in the future now officially from Anthropic. I need him to add more videos to his channel on agentic coding. Looks like that won't happen anytime soon.
Someone who already over a year ago said that he barely touches keyboard does not really have my confidence as a tech person.
Great person and great company
I hope he still gets to do some educative stuff on the side too
Karpathy is a terrific communicator and populariser of the LLM landscape, and I do hope this isn't going to mean his work in that regard now gets dropped, or dropped into a private Anthropic-only void.
He should have done his own lab. He seems like someone capable of it and might bring some unique ideas.
> He should have done his own lab
Which raises the question: what can he do at Anthropic that he couldn't on his own?
Seems to me that you need incredible amounts of money to be competitive in the frontier model arena. I don't know how much money Karpathy has to spend, but I'd imagine that the money needed would almost certainly mean investors with deep pockets.
And then there's the uncertainty, will the AI "wars" be some winner-takes-all situation? Will the smaller labs eventually be acquired by the bigger ones, will they simply wash away if there's a crash?
I don't know. If you can land some exceptional gig at the big firms, maybe the financials are good enough to not start your own lab. Minimizing risk, and all that.
EDIT: Assuming such a startup would focus on frontier models.
> you need incredible amounts of money to be competitive in the frontier model arena
This is my assumption.
> there's the uncertainty, will the AI "wars" be some winner-takes-all situation? Will the smaller labs eventually be acquired by the bigger ones, will they simply wash away if there's a crash?
He's Andrej Karpathy. He could wait to let the winner surface. Obviously better to get in with the winner earlier. But worse to get on the wrong team versus on the right team late.
Make a lot of money.
He can be at the frontier while just having a regular job. Every other option is a lot more work.
Two years ago I’d agree, now he probably wants access to the immense capacity they have where if he were to start a lab from zero now, the ramp up to frontier pushing would require a lot more time. I don’t he needs the money as it is, and wherever he were to go would certainly make it worthwhile financially. Some people may just be cool with a couple hundred million dollars in their lifetime
It’s not enough to have unique ideas. You need capital, compute, people, distribution, customers… There’s huge appeal to joining a place that has all those things and lets you pursue your unique ideas without worrying about all that.
I'm pretty sure Karpathy can have billions of capital if he wanted to.
Karpathy's career arc feels similar to Jim Keller's; a butterfly flitting from one flower to another, gathering experiences and creating magic everywhere they go.
I don't think Karpathy has nearly the portfolio of accomplishments. I think of him more as an educator.
He is citing R&D? I have always been under the impression that he is an image recognition etc. expert rather than an LLM expert.
So, does Anthropic pivot to military tech or pretend to do so before the IPO?
Or is this simply a deal where he uses his formidable influencer skills for Anthropic and gets to cash in on the IPO?
I have been impressed by some of his work, especially on the vulgarisation and simplification. Excellent communicator and engineer. But I am a bit more skeptical about his taste and vision.
Leaving OpenAI to work for Elon Musk was a poor move, and AFAIK his work on CV at Tesla did not bring anything groundbreaking, unfortunately probably the opposite (the bet on camera-only driven system did not pay off) and his talks about the approach would indicate that his whole idea to make it work was nothing more than hill-climbing.
Also, his over-reaction to the whole Claw thing was a bit ridiculous, in my opinion.
I don't see him as a Scientist in the field, but more as an efficient tinkerer.
i think his “fame” in the past few years has been creating teaching materials, projects, etc with lots of nuanced informative takes around the LLM space
Sort of makes me sad, but . . . everyone has a price.
Not about money, but knowledge. The frontier of the field is no longer accessible through arXiv or research papers only.
One thing is that the companies are holding on because of competitive advantage, and I think another is that AI is such a politically polarizing topic that actually being open about everything is risky for the companies, wanting to avoid controversy.
I worked for MS and Apple for 20 years and heard that opinion constantly; i.e., "People only work there for the money."
I have no idea if Andrej "sold out" but perhaps he realizes that if he wants to work on the cutting edge alongside talented people, with a seemingly endless budget, Anthropic is a good choice.
I chose my employers for the same reason; the compensation was secondary.
MS and Apple. Infinite resources, plenty of smart people that consider compensation to be secondary (I remain skeptical, but choose to entertain the idea nonetheless), and the software output is incredibly, unbelievably, comically bad.
There's some poetry there that I am unable to capture with words.
The big question is... Why now? What happened to Eureka Labs?
Maybe the IPO potential was just too great to ignore and maybe AGI (A Giant IPO) is around the corner.
AGI around the corner. Comparatively little point educating people instead of machines
If someone knew AGI was around the corner they'd be buying an island and a yacht not taking on a job.
Pressure, a lot of researchers believe LLMs will be able to self-improve. It's a good time right now to make some extra money.
I, personally, don't think there will be a better time for researchers to make so much money in a few years in any future of LLMs.
Great communicator. It’s sad that he had joined a closed llm org. I would have expected him to join forces with someone else releasing open-source models rivaling chinese model landscape. Capital always accumulates to the capital holder in capitalism :)
Hopefully he gets them to opensource some models, in the same way that Google does.
Somebody got showered with stock options.
Money always wins.
True.
Come on, he definitely has more money than he needs given his past employers. For someone with his creative output, he probably just enjoys having an environment to build and explore.
Your argument contradicts itself.
If money was not an issue he could just build that environment for himself.
Do you have any idea how much it costs to build a frontier model and how much money it takes to enable R&D at the cutting edge?
No, money is not the only barrier to building things. I think karoathy could build his own lab if he wanted, but it would be years of doing things he doesn’t want. Why waste time running a business when he’d rather be researching?
i can play by myself, or i can join some friends, and make the play more joyful
The overhead of maintaining and running things isn't interesting to most creative folk. They'd rather others deal with the minutiae (managing a company, etc) so they can focus on their thing.
I don't think this is true. He strikes me as a person motivated by curiosity and interesting problems.
Still, one can buy lot of interesting problems with that money.
It's the only way he could get more tokens beyond the Max 20x plan lol.
As a OpenAI founder he already is long past the point of money being a consideration.
didnt he foreshadow this in a recent interview? lmao
Pretty big talent win for Anthropic. Karpathy is one of those people who was working on AI before it became "a thing," and he's definitely both a thought leader and influential practitioner today.
Not exactly .. he was at the forefront of computer vision (CNNs, image captioning) for a while during the ImageNet era, then joined OpenAI in 2015 but left for Tesla in 2017 before they released GPT-1. During Karpathy's time at OpenAI they were still working on games. He left Tesla in 2022, briefly rejoining OpenAI, but this was after OpenAI had already released ChatGPT (GPT-3.5), so he missed the first hand experience of the whole AI=LLM explosion.
Well, I am listening.
very interesting news... we are living in exciting times.
My personal update: just quit playing modded Minecraft. Thinking of downloading Apex Legends. What is everyone doing?
This guy is the next Ted Bundy.
Anthropic is really trying to drum up PR before the IPO, its almost comical