OpenAI Co-Founder Andrej Karpathy Joins Anthropic

OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy has joined rival AI lab Anthropic. "The hire is a major coup for Anthropic in the high-stakes competition for elite AI talent -- and another sign the company is emerging as a magnet for some of the industry's most respected technical minds," reports Axios. From the report: Karpathy will start this week on Anthropic's pre-training team, which is responsible for the massive training runs that give Claude its core knowledge and capabilities, according to Anthropic. Karpathy will help launch a new team focused on using Claude itself to accelerate pretraining research -- an increasingly important frontier as AI companies race to automate parts of AI development. "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," Karpathy said in a post on X.

Karpathy is a rare AI figure with credibility across research, industry and education. He was a founding member of OpenAI before serving as Tesla's director of AI, where he led the computer vision team behind Autopilot. Karpathy coined the term "vibe coding" and recently described himself as being in a "state of AI psychosis" since December -- embracing "tokenmaxxing" and aggressively stress-testing frontier models.

Elon must be ecstatic for him

[haruchai]

perhaps he'll start calling OpenAI the xAI graveyard like he used to do for Apple and Tesla

Re:

[Himmy32]

Clearly the guy knows to keep his nose clean considering he's worked for all three.

Sportsball for "tech"

[Quakeulf]

This is sounding more and more like sportsball but for people who align themselves in some way with the "tech"-industry. Whatever these companies produce is mostly high-cost entertainment anyhow. They keep ignoring physics, so their "solutions" are unreliable when before a simple db-lookup would give the same result every time, we now are gambling like in a casino, and the house always win.

Re:

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Not sure I understand how to vibe code a new app with a simple db look up. If you can get an AI into a loop where It can test its solutions... thats what leads to impressive things. And skynet of course. We will have sky net soon. But like the first wave of bombs will be defective because humans were in the loop and didn't maintain them. Then the bombs may go off for real, then stop and try to apologize to people, then blame others for the deads, then bomb those that complain about their frame job. It will

Embarassing

[ZipNada]

Sounds like OpenAI is really struggling. They've already suffered a lot of brain drain, and in fact Anthropic was founded by former employees. I'm suspecting low morale, distrust of Altman, increasingly bad reputation of the company, etc. If I were Karpathy I'd want to play on a winning team with a better attitude too.

OpenAI has remarkable potential

[JoeyRox]

To be one of the biggest business failures of all time, in terms of drop from peak valuation to its nadir. It's currently valued at just shy of $1T, with a bottom that defies imagination. They can't get this IPO'd fast enough.