He moves around quite a bit. Less than 2 years on average if you take away the longest and shortest jobs. It feels like this is just a celebrity hire to help raise IPO value, and then he'll move again when the tech hits another real-world scaling wall. Expect another short stint (stunt) with Anthropic.
didn't FB grant someone else $1B over 4 years or something for some AI lead role? Wouldn't be surprised if this guy is getting similar offers, which could explode even further with the stratospheric valuations of top AI companies.
> And 2 years is probably pretty average for the whole tech industry.
maybe for a fungible CRUD engineer. I think Karpathy is in a different league and I'm certainly surprised to hear this fact. I would expect someone like him to sit within a certain lab for a long time
He's an extraordinarily bright guy. He can get a lot more done in two years than most people, and he can get up to speed with a new organization and a new task and be productive much faster than most people.
My impression with no inside knowledge, but understanding what Elon companies are like, is that he was assigned essentially an impossible task at Tesla and tried his very best, but it could not be done, and he semi-burned out. It makes sense for him to be getting back on the horse now.
The Elon approach to management as I see it is to assign what normally would be totally unreasonable goals to a small group of extremely bright people, and they work their asses off and somehow find a way. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn't. If it works and the impossible was in fact, just barely possible, you dominate the market, everyone gets rich, and the people see it as the most exciting, intense, and rewarding part of their career. If it doesn't, they get depressed, divorced, and looking for other work. The Elon magic is threading the needle closely enough that a lot of the seemingly impossible things are in fact possible with enough hard work and brainpower, but although Elon is extremely good at this, the nature of the thing is that you can't predict which side you'll wind up on fully accurately.
That seems like the opposite. Why would someone with high market value stay in one place? 2 years is basically optimal - you vest 50%, maybe collect a promotion, do some good work and learn a lot, and then get to move on for another solid bump/ promotion and a new set of stocks.
I expect the people with low market value to be the ones sticking around labs for long periods of time, they don't have the option to move and they aren't getting poached.
Depends on the country, I guess. In Europe, it would definitely not be the norm and I would definitely call previous employers if it was several 2 year stints.
2-3 years is pretty average tenure inside the EU tech sector for the past few years [1], but regardless I don't know what that tells us, given that nothing else about this is average. The sample size of Andrej-sized talent in an ongoing tech revolution of epic proportions is just very small.
While I absolutely confirm that everything you said is true, it’s interesting that that call would be illegal in many European countries. And in many more you would at best get a „I can confirm this person worked on this position in this timeframe“
Hmm, interesting point, I did not know that. But, aside from that, while they cannot tell you that the candidate would not be ok, I did get hints on what to look out for.
I mean, you always have to take the previous employers' statements with a grain of salt, but if they say they really employed for just that project, it's also good info.
At startups? Sure. Several stints at non-startups? Well, how much of that time was spent learning the domain? Is that knowledge transferrable (probably not because of non-competition clause)? Why were you not happy at the previous employer?
I am not saying any of these don't have valid answers. What I am saying is that we would prefer juniors that are commited and do the hard work when the work gets hard. And, at least where I work now, this gets recognized, and they become seniors in time.
I would not say that this is because of this point. It's because investors in Europe are more conservative. Employees are as well, it's true, so it's strange to have someone out of the norm. It's not a red flag per se, but it's a thing to be evaluated.
Europe’s labor market is sadly still mostly out of touch with how startups work. It’s stuck in the last century. I’m not sure if this is due to tradition, or due to the fact that startups are much harder to start in Europe in general, so people on both sides of the hiring process have less experience with it.
Two years is more than long enough to join a startup, build 3 things, and see that your equity is never going to be worth anything, and find a new job. This isn’t anomalous or weird.
It's about equity worth nothing jn Europe as an employee. Europe is a bad place for employees to join a startup. Lots of time people are attracted with shares/stars whatever. Only to find out they get nothing or are taxed to hell.
There is a reason why Europe is failing.
If you're really in Europe then I'm sure you know that calling previous employers is completely pointless, the best you'll get is "yes this person has worked here before".
And I work in games and 2-3 years at each company is pretty normal, with some exceptions people just finish a project and then move(or are let go, unfortunately). YMMV of course.
Depends, but definitely not pointless. Though, I do have the benefit of working in a small country, so chances are that I will know of the company and perchance know folks that work there. Even if not, employers will still see fit to help each other, at least if they are not direct competitors.
> I work in games and 2-3 years at each company is pretty normal, with some exceptions people just finish a project and then move(or are let go, unfortunately). YMMV of course.
Yeah, being laid off every 2-3 years is a lot different from job hopping and shows exactly why the games industry is in its own little pocket of screwed in this market. Especially with games taking 3-5+ years to be made. How do you keep institutional knowledge when you kick it all out and basically start from scratch every cycle.
Claude code was one person's idea as a pet project and now it's singlehandedly 5x'd Anthropic's valuation. Sometimes single people matter, that's life.
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.
Specifically it looks like he's planning to extend the ideas from https://github.com/karpathy/autoresearch into a larger effort towards recursive training improvement [1]:
> Excited to welcome Andrej to the Pretraining team! He'll be building a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pretraining research itself. I can’t think of anyone better suited to do it — looking forward to what we build together!
You don't understand: no ones ever reading more than 1% of the training material; so they need someone who has reduced that to 0.1%. The less you know, the more you know!
the glorified marketer framing in this thread is missing the bigger signal. karpathy publicly pausing eureka labs to join anthropic is an ai founder of his caliber effectively conceding that verticals get eaten by frontier upgrades.for everyone here building on top of foundation, that's the actual news
people often found businesses to write off expensive purchases. my friend has a "company" which does nothing but he wrote off a $5000 MBP for this business expenses...
He’s a great educator and seems like a genuinely nice guy, at least on interviews. I hope he continues with his teaching career on the side, although the crazy amount of NDAs he probably had to sign may make that effort a bit difficult.
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.
Good for him, his public work these last ~1-2 years has been influential for me, as I'm sure it has for others.
I even share his concern about struggling to keep pace with the rate of change lately, and agree that my working in a frontier lab or any other such environment would certainly help with that!
I have a weird background mix of analytic philosophy, linguistics/NLP, propaganda research, and long-term institutional data science/strategy work, which unfortunately does not make ATS systems especially low-friction as I try to jump industries.
So I keep busy the best I can: lately building tooling around runtime observability, intent legibility, and intervention in LLM systems.
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.
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 this research into something very interesting.
p.s. called it
> 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.
(https://www.axios.com/2026/05/19/anthropic-openai-karpathy-a...)
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.
Those projects are a complete joke. Neither of them were even original, people have been playing around with those ideas for well over a year.
They just became "famous" because Karpathy is effectively an AI celebrity, so he could throw shit at a wall and post it on X and it would get 10k Github stars.
But seriously, people have been using the models to tweak hyperparemeters, or using LLMs to help create a second brain using markdown or json files or 100X other combinations of files, for a long time already.
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.
Yea, I say this as a marketing agency owner, not a developer or AI researcher, that besides Sam Altman, Dario, Demis and Elon, that Karpathy is one of the most influential I follow.
There’s a lot of value for the business world in learning AI from someone who has been at the top of their game but now is doing a general service by being a great educator and translator between the fields.
His recent Wiki approach may be simple to devs but is certainly an aha moment for the rest of the peanut gallery paying attention!
> 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.
Hasn't Carmack solved a few serious engineering problems, making Oculus more or less the most advanced VR device? (The fact that an advanced VR device does not seem to be needed by the mass market is not an engineering problem.)
Yes - but - ironically - he did that _before_ joining them. IIRC he literally started collaborating and helping them while being at a different company.
That seems surprisingly common to me. Visionary engineer has solution to problem, gets hired, solves the broad strokes in the first year, then spends N more years in meetings with exec stakeholders and worrying about schedules/hiring/financials instead of _doing the vision work_.
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.
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 (rich old guy marries hot young chick). Anthropic get a "glorified marketer", and he gets a front 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.
Maybe poor choice of words on my part - what I meant was that this doesn't appear to be a case of AI research co. hires AI researcher to do AI research.
A regular marriage is transactional to some extent too right, but not quite the same as Anna Nicole Smith marrying a 90yr old.
As an aside, an Indian guy I used to work with once explained to me how traditional Indian arranged marriages, like his own, work, and they are HIGHLY transactional. It's not just a matter of same caste, same social status etc, but an explicit trade off. In my co-worker's case he cheerfully told me how his wife was very dark skinned, therefore considered not that attractive/desirable (to other Indians!), but her family had money and social status so it was considered a fair trade for a nice looking boy like himself!
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!”
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.
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
Yes, that's probably his dumbest public idea to date. Given that this GPT repos and parts of autoresearch are brilliant I'm sympathetic. I think he's earned the right to exhibit mild expressions of AI psychosis at this point.
And, my objection was that he clearly had no understanding of the supply-chain risk he was worsening by advocating widespread use of Obsidian for agentic engineering tasks.
Since his announcement, Obsidian has taken proactive steps to mitigate the risks, or at least study threat model. Hopefully, they will implement proper RBAC or something before someone else with his visibility announces an even more irresponsible half-baked idea.
he's not dumb or desperate compared to the average person, but it's very possible to be dumb and desperate compared to the delusional promises and outsized amounts of money in the industry. Manages to make smart people look extremely stupid every day.
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.
There are things that you can only explore and learn in those places, for obvious reasons.
I don't know his personal life goals but he's a great communicator and educator, if this decision makes him more up to date, and allows him to create even more relevant content then is something everyone will benefit. I understand the risks of being bias toward one company and not the other, but if you look at the content he created so far, he always talk principle first and specific tool later.
I think people here should give him the benefit of the doubt.
yes stop kidding yourself that he is going in as a tech leader in terms of providing technical innovation..at that stage its your persona that matters not the tech (sure I think Anthropic is going to listen to his advice..but its a transactional marketing win primarly)
his value to Anthropic is his influence..he has over 2 million followers, and value is that he is the Top influencer for AI right now, like it or not. just like Selena Gomez might be for top for women age 21-29...
Every AI nerd I know reposts his (very thoughtful posts and projects mind you) like religon
He may not be a brilliant researcher, but he is a brilliant teacher. I am glad he is joining Anthropic so he can stay up to date with the next round of things that he will teach :)
FWIW while Karpathy was at Tesla he was basically working on the vision component. The actual driving component (using vision as an input) was originally all C++. They may have started migrating parts of the driving component from C++ to neural networks while Karpathy was there, but most of it happened after he left in 2022, with the big switch being FSD 12 in 2024. User reports from before/after FSD 12 are like night and day.
I'm not talking about vision (cameras) vs lidar etc, just the Tesla FSD architecture that separates the "vision" component (turning camera/sensor inputs into symbolic road/sign/vehicle/pedestrian/etc data), and the driving component which takes the vision data, plus current location and destination, and uses that to actually drive the car - switch lanes, make turns, avoid obstacles etc etc.
Tesla self driving kind of works. In a very similar way to how it kind of worked back in 2016. It's better than it was in 2016, don't get me wrong. But even today they haven't solved the problem and Karpathy left in 2022. And other companies notably have actually surpassed Tesla over that time. I don't think anyone could reasonably say he walked away in 2022 because he thought the job was finished.
I somehow felt he, along with Andrew Ng, are very few well-known AI experts that are left behind on the money side during the AI-gets-me-super-rich crazy time, unfortunately.
I can't speak for Andrew Ng - but my take is he did out of pure altruism - love. just in terms of advancing free education e.g coursera & the free machine learning courses etc he brought to the masses.
Well Karpathy left in 2017, and all the sort of commercial stuff didn't happen till a while later - for example they set up the structure to take external money in 2019 and that's obviously the point at which they'd found the pathway that justified doing massive training runs and all that. So Karpathy was out very early (left at the point that Musk thought OpenAI had basically failed).
Or they collude by hiring each others engineers as a way to create manageable competition and information sharing outside their fiduciary duty to shareholders.
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 read this as a bad sign for Anthropic. Relying yet again on more hype instead of improving products.
OpenAI’s hiring recently has been much stronger, whether through luck or structure. The “no-name” guys have actual taste. I love that. I don’t care that they’re no-names.
I don’t know Karpathy personally, I won’t speak bad about a man I don’t know. I hope he makes CC better. I just read this as hype. My point is that there’s nothing he has that an empowered no-name product manager doesn’t. It’s like Alex Wang at Meta. That acq didn’t redeem Meta. They actually lost LeCun. Where’s Llama today?
Regardless of what Anthropic’s share price is, OpenAI has been fucking killing it recently. I don’t take particular pleasure in saying that, i’ve been a google and gemini guy for years
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.
>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’m hoping Karpathy will make Claude Code better, in the meantime I’m super happy seeing a small product manager like Tibo fucking crushing it on Codex
Joking aside, there are small communities pushing codex and AI to the bleeding edge of what's possible.
Here I'll give you an example. The last few updates from Boris at CC have been tweaks to the system prompt to make it use less compute, effectively making the system dumber, making it tell you to go to bed. I mean come on! Tibo has been impressing me, bc they're building the things these small communities are building.
One of the things these bleeding edge guys and girls have been working on is a /goal feature, essentially ralph loops. Codex released it as a feature the other day. I can't help but be impressed. As an ex-pm, this is product management.
Then you take a look at what the Chinese are doing on their own forums, and it just makes what Google and Anthropic are doing look outdated. OpenAI feels competitive, which I like. What's coming will not be kind to us, we adapt or we die.
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.
To be fair, Mythos is probably one of the most significant marketing pushes in the industry in both impact and investment.
I am sure there is an element of reality in it's capabilities, but there's also a significant amount of "We don't have the compute to handle this at scale", and "look look, we have the best model. It's so good that you can't even compare it to other models. That is how good we are."
I’m noticing a real disconnect in the user base about this
The Claude maximalists that can never see any wrong in anything and the users that care about actual capability
These guys are going to be in for a rude awakening when the Chinese are steamrolling us with data centers you can see from space and better models, Amodei will tell you that himself
Hey, it's not like the Chinese have a serious demographic crisis they can't cope with, and their only hope is to significantly increase productivity per worker.
Whenever I see a user base turn against actual users or imply censorship or discredit actual experiences it always ends in a death spiral: Deny -> Product stops improving -> Censor -> Die
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 product iterations, 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’s extremely compute intensive, but also very satisfying.
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.
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.
Furthermore, he was extremely hireable with numerous job opportunitys available to him. He would not be destitute or even particularly worse off if he did quit for ethical reasons. Any self-preservation defense is also invalid.
Andrej Karpathy is a reason* Tesla doesn’t have Lidar and thus is a reason Tesla self driving isn’t nearly as safe as it could be?
He heard Elon say “I drive with eyes, so cars just need eyes” & shipped?
:( happy to have my impressions corrected (but I was kind of pretending it’s a 2026 scenario where you could slap Lidar, ship a Waymo, if you were just willing to spend the friggin MONEY - 2017 was too early for most any “self” driving IIRC)
-
*edit - in a scenario where his refusal to skip Lidar catalyzed change
According to ABET they do if they want the degree to be accredited. We had two classes for my SE degree. From Criterion 3. Student Outcomes:
"2. an ability to apply engineering design to produce solutions that meet specified needs with consideration of public health, safety, and welfare, as well as global, cultural, social, environmental, and economic factors."
"4. an ability to recognize ethical and professional responsibilities in engineering situations and make informed judgments, which must consider the impact of engineering solutions in global, economic, environmental, and societal contexts."
Passing a mandatory class != believing in its message and acting on it.
Unfortunately, rather important courses like engineering ethics have become lumped in with mandatory DEI objectives and similar 'grievance studies' requirements, classes which many suffer through quietly, regurgitating the Correct responses while they count the minutes until they can get back to more substantive classwork. Some undergraduates may unfortunately gloss over ethics just as they gloss over lectures on privilege.
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.
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.
Well, one big difference now is that you need to billions to become the next big player. The barriers to entry are incredibly high, if you plan on competing against the big players.
Of course, there could be some future lab or startup which completely revolutionizes the field by going for some approach that doesn't require a boatload of money to train a model, but for now, we're stuck with the LLMs and the costs they come with..
Not so sure on the advertising front. B2C is now mostly social media, and Google doesn't own any. That's why the pivoted hard to YouTube shorts to try and capture that segment, but it is nowhere near TikTok or Instagram. Case in point, Meta's advertising revenue is predicted to surpass Google's this year.
You underestimate that YouTube has become what TV was for the majority of young people. Premium is relatively lucrative - but the ad revenue is insane. If Google can succeed in building an AI to generate slop to hold eyeballs fixed on the screen and cut out creators it will be a highly profitable dystopia. Facebook is similarly positioned (via Instagram - not Facebook itself) while TikTok is in a highly unpredictable state with the recent acquisition. Oracle may stay hands off and treat it as a golden goose but that hasn't been the recent track record for anyone with the surname Ellison.
Searching “invest $10[0]k into USA index funds low fees”, the Vanguard funds that come up! (Vanguard sounds a little special, maybe they do good marketing. Ah, per Wiki: “Vanguard is owned by the funds managed by the company and is therefore owned by its customers.”)
That's a funny thing to say as time is infinite, and we're at the early stages of every single thing. Reasoning in time dynamics is useful though to be clear
Hypothetically you take the leading expert of a field and say "they believe in their own field too much - far more than I do as a layman - and therefore surely must have psychosis."
Why should I trust that your assessment is correct? Is it likely to ever be correct in the case of a doctor/mechanical engineer/athlete/economist/whatever? So why do so many people insist that an incredibly intelligent AI researcher has fallen into some obvious trap?
Because we're paying attention? A lot of "smart" people are lost in the AI sauce, grandstanding that they are going to change the very fabric of society. Generally leading experts in other fields are not making the same hyperbolic, self-indulgent, embarrassing statements.
At risk of being "lost in the AI sauce", do you seriously believe that AI isn't actively changing the fabric of society? Almost feels like we're living in totally different realities if that isn't clear-cut
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.
yeah but i don't think there's any large org which is 'good guys'. Anyone who wants to become a monopoly or very very large is probably suffering from some sort of a neural condition (psychosis, if plural) which we will study 100 years from now. Right now they are rewarded but I think our little minds forget to take the negative externalities into account.
I am working on a short story on this topic which is set in 2100s, where most humans have internalized the concept of 'having enough' after the great conflict. But some specimen have started to show signs of this syndrome again, and neuroscientists and psychologists are grappling to understand where it originated from.
...and then silently got back to talks with DoD [0] and gave them the Mythos model. Separately, they went back on their promise to only develop models that they can guarantee are safe [1]. I reckon considering which country they are HQ'ed in, building skynet is in their destiny.
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
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 can spare a minute :). This isn't exhaustive because this is just stuff I know of, obviously.
- At Stanford, Led research on the first (to my knowledge) crop of joint image/text models. Super widely cited work.
- At Tesla, led their whole self driving effort for a while, came up with critical techniques that allowed them to make progress (e.g., the concept of "auto labelling": using a much larger NN to generate training data with which to train smaller models that could fit in the on-device compute. IIRC, Elon said they would not have been able to make progress without this insight).
I'm not sure his educative efforts for the mold of what you're looking for, but if so, the course he designed at Stanford (and availed online):for neural networks, as well as his blog posts, (most famous of which, to my knowledge, is "the unreasonable effectiveness of LSTMs"), made a huge impact on educating a generation of tinkerers and researchers.
EDIT: It looks like you deleted the part of your post I quoted below. So feel free to ignore my question about it, I guess.
---------------------
Not sure what you mean by
> Shows how much you know
Do you mean that the fact that I misremembered a word on the title suggests that I know very little about Karpathy's contributions to the field of neural networks?
I was more looking for signal that him + Anthropic might yield something beyond a step-change from Opus 4.7 (disappointing so far). We have not gotten to use Mythos yet, I wonder if that will become Opus 5 or something.
Anyone else fearing Anthropic more and more each day? Not from a perspective that they are doing so well, but rather that it's like an industry tornado, sucking up and destroying everything in it's path.
1. Bun is right there on Github. You can download can use it right now.
2. Sure, that's one thing.
3. Coefficient Bio is not a thing. They don't have a product. Ever. It's just Anthropic hired 10 people for a ridiculous amount of premium bonus. (Time will prove it's a bad decision, btw)
Selfishly, I hope this doesn't reduce to 0 the amount of time he spends doing educational content, which seems like a particular strength of his. I presume this means Eureka Labs is not releasing any product or course.
Wondering what the plan is to steward Eureka Labs, LLM101n, and whatever else was being cooked up. As a fellow educator, was very much looking forward to seeing how this would have evolved things.
It actually feels like a signal that it is in a tapering phase.
As in, if it was in a growth phase a freeform, solo - collab with who you want, would be more beneficial. But in a tapering phase you'd want structure and to be in the private formal meetings.
Or, you could fit the exactly opposite story to the same data:
Growth is when you want to have institutional support, to be at the tip, backed by infinite money and best compute infra, and benefit disproportionally from compounding. Conversely tapering is when you're best flying under the radar, and there's plenty of value both in ideas and in hardware, as the leading players shed excess they can't support anymore, ...
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.
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.
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.
A viable path to becoming a billionaire or a viable path to build something that met its goal? There are several notable educational content companies that run on quite minimal budgets once they have the platform and other (mostly) capital expenditures taken care of.
You're not entirely wrong but your snide tone is annoying and unsuitable for this platform. Anyway,
1. Claude Code is widely used and beloved despite not benchmaxxing on the terminalbench like these harnesses that nobody has ever heard of or uses.
5. Karpathy's contributions are way more than CS 231n and coining vibe coding. In terms of pedagogy, his "zero to hero" videos, nanoGPT, etc, are all great. For actual work, he also built a great org at Tesla.
NTA but Claude Code is everything but beloved. It's incredibly meh, very buggy (to that extend that customers were literally losing money), heavily vibecoded and all around just... bad. I appreciate it for kickstarting the whole terminal agent thing and I would still use it but only because Anthropic mandates it for using Claude with your subscription.
Also I'm a little bitter, prior to this I never had trouble getting my username on websites. No one used this combination of 4 letters for godamn anything.
It's going to be dramatic - it's unclear how much of their DAUs are organic and how much is through their PE usage deals. There's a large amount of organic usage certainly, it's a useful tool, but there are quite a few of the tell tale signs that they have an internal number they want their user acquisition to be at and they're failing to meet that through organic growth.
I wonder if the timing of this, coming so soon after the Musk/Anthropic data center deal is just coincidence or not?
From Karpathy's various interviews I get the impression that he wants to leave the door open to working for Musk again at some point, perhaps on TeslaBot.
With Musk for now regarding Anthropic as a partner (or at least an enemy of his enemy), that seems to mean that Karpathy joining them is less likely to anger Musk than might otherwise have been the case. Who knows, maybe Karpathy was involved in brokering this data center deal?
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.
If you don't actually have the desire to build, lead, and manage a large organization, this is a terrible idea for technical geniuses. A guy like him will instantly raise $1 billion which means hiring dozens of people, which means tons of interviews, management, performance review, planning, board meetings, etc etc.
It's good that there are avenues today for people to make tens or hundreds of $m in salaried positions at companies so that they don't have to do that stuff to get paid their value if they don't genuinely want to.
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
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.
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.
Mo money, mo problems. Just let the dude work, he’s not starving and he’s probably enjoying his life not completely wrapped up in the stress that running a company in this market must be.
Congrats Andrej. Let me know if you are looking for someone to take over Eureka Labs. We were in the same WoW classic guild. domrdy on x. We can duel for it :). Also, I need $10M if any VCs are reading this.
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.
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.
The implications of what AGI would do to the economy has a high chance of mass civil unrest. Just the announcement could set it off. If you had the resources you won’t want to be around for it.
good name recognition for Anthropic mega IPO. everything Anthropic does now is all gear toward its IPO from buying Bun, Stainless, getting big name AI guy to join...etc.
I have respect for Karpathy. Not for anyone who made Claude or promotes it. So this is a shame. But I can't fault anyone for accepting an offer with (I assume) lots of 0's in the dollar part.
Honestly happy he’s back at a foundation lab. He will have insane impact there. Of course one of the best educators in the world it’s a bit sad he gave up building and education tool.
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.
I understand where you are coming from, but at least when I was there, we were still trying to develop solutions that had never been implemented at that scale before (just like Anthropic today). I helped create the first version of Visual Studio (Boston). People tend to forget that even by the 90s we still didn't really understand how to solve a lot of the main technical problems. That's what I loved about the work. Everything seems easy/obvious after the fact.
When I left MS, a full Windows build was about 18M LOC. The fact that 18 million lines of code, written by tens of thousands of engineers, worked at all was a mini miracle.
With regard to compensation: like Karpathy, I had already earned enough to be comfortable for the rest of my life. Once money stopped being the primary driver, I was able to focus on what made me happy. Building things, even if you don't like them, brought me happiness and fulfillment. I hope Andrej finds the same at Anthropic.
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.
> the bet on camera-only driven system did not pay off
This is a pretty unsubstantiated claim. Tesla is now launching robotaxis at a fraction of the cost of Waymos, in part because they don't need all the Lidar.
But Tesla has been promising full self-driving "next year" for quite a long time now, and it seems they are stuck at the "95% there" stage basically forever.
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
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.
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.
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?
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 :)
Congrats to Karpathy. I wonder whether this is the right time to join Anthropic. Looks like it from the outside.
But - unpopular opinion - I believe Anthropic is one open-source model away (that can code well) from a massive revenue/stock crash. We're already seeing Claude's cost escalate to astronomical levels. Most coding work is medium difficulty in the grand scheme of things. So the future is an open source model small enough to fit in your local 16GB VRAM, giving you a Claude Code like experience for zero token cost. That's going to wipe out most of Anthropic's current revenue base. It does have several cool initiatives in the pipeline, but bad things happen once your bread and butter is threatened (just ask OpenAI).
I heavily weight the explosive revenue growth of Anthropic and OpenAI above speculation about what open source models may do in the future. I've heard for over 6 months that there's no moat but the revenue growth keeps proving it wrong. Opinions have to adjust to meet reality. There's some kind of moat, for now at least, that is not being appreciated in the conventional wisdom.
(If they were just burning Capex and nobody wanted to use their product or their gross margins were bad then I'd agree with you)
Your opinion also holds weight. In fact, I've been in your camp throughout, only having changed my mind in the last few weeks. I've seen legitimate instances of Anthropic costs surprising medium to large enterprises, so that's a demand shock. On the supply side, I've seen some very intense benchmarking going on at r/LocalLlama (the #1 community for opensource LLM tinkering IMO). It just feels like we're in a powder keg right now.
Model diversity is really their weak point. OpenAI has embeddings, audio, image, video (RIP). Anthropic has ... Claude. It's a great model for a lot of things, but it's super risky to just have one thing you're good at (from a business standpoint).
Looks like the one sector of the commercial AI world that will outlast the open source - local hardware transition is the military-industrial sector. I wonder what kind of classification-security rating is needed these days for onboarding?
“According to reports from The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian, the AI model Claude, developed by Anthropic, was used in the initial U.S.-Israel military operations against Iran in late February 2026. The system, integrated into a platform developed by defense contractor Palantir, assisted with intelligence analysis, scenario planning, and targeting for strikes that resulted in the death of Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei”
Immense respect for Karpathy but are these people that optimistic about AI?
I mean short gig, few million dollars for Karpathy so makes sense for him but others should read the Cloudflare's report about the super scary model that Anthropic wouldn't release because they love humanity more than their balance sheet.
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.
Recently on the all in podcast, they talked about how Anthropic is probably the next big monopoly. Given how quickly they have been growing and all of the products they are pushing out rapidly (even if they are sloppy), the acquisitions, and the people they are hiring, it feels like that may actually end up being true.
But what is the solution? I don’t think it is safe for a society built on free speech and other liberal values to have a couple extremely powerful companies controlling all our information and imposing their rules and their politics on top of us. It was bad enough under the FAANG companies. This will be worse.
Personally I’m not comfortable with how much power Anthropic is accumulating. And with them partnering shamelessly with Elon Musk to use a datacenter powered by potentially illegal natural gas turbines, I feel like Dario is just not trustworthy.
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
He moves around quite a bit. Less than 2 years on average if you take away the longest and shortest jobs. It feels like this is just a celebrity hire to help raise IPO value, and then he'll move again when the tech hits another real-world scaling wall. Expect another short stint (stunt) with Anthropic.
rest & vest if he makes it to IPO
I wonder what's his net worth - probably 100M+?
didn't FB grant someone else $1B over 4 years or something for some AI lead role? Wouldn't be surprised if this guy is getting similar offers, which could explode even further with the stratospheric valuations of top AI companies.
5 years at Tesla is an eternity in the tech world.
And 2 years is probably pretty average for the whole tech industry.
> And 2 years is probably pretty average for the whole tech industry.
maybe for a fungible CRUD engineer. I think Karpathy is in a different league and I'm certainly surprised to hear this fact. I would expect someone like him to sit within a certain lab for a long time
He's an extraordinarily bright guy. He can get a lot more done in two years than most people, and he can get up to speed with a new organization and a new task and be productive much faster than most people.
My impression with no inside knowledge, but understanding what Elon companies are like, is that he was assigned essentially an impossible task at Tesla and tried his very best, but it could not be done, and he semi-burned out. It makes sense for him to be getting back on the horse now.
The Elon approach to management as I see it is to assign what normally would be totally unreasonable goals to a small group of extremely bright people, and they work their asses off and somehow find a way. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn't. If it works and the impossible was in fact, just barely possible, you dominate the market, everyone gets rich, and the people see it as the most exciting, intense, and rewarding part of their career. If it doesn't, they get depressed, divorced, and looking for other work. The Elon magic is threading the needle closely enough that a lot of the seemingly impossible things are in fact possible with enough hard work and brainpower, but although Elon is extremely good at this, the nature of the thing is that you can't predict which side you'll wind up on fully accurately.
That seems like the opposite. Why would someone with high market value stay in one place? 2 years is basically optimal - you vest 50%, maybe collect a promotion, do some good work and learn a lot, and then get to move on for another solid bump/ promotion and a new set of stocks.
I expect the people with low market value to be the ones sticking around labs for long periods of time, they don't have the option to move and they aren't getting poached.
Depends on the country, I guess. In Europe, it would definitely not be the norm and I would definitely call previous employers if it was several 2 year stints.
2-3 years is pretty average tenure inside the EU tech sector for the past few years [1], but regardless I don't know what that tells us, given that nothing else about this is average. The sample size of Andrej-sized talent in an ongoing tech revolution of epic proportions is just very small.
[1] https://ravio.com/blog/employee-tenure-trends
While I absolutely confirm that everything you said is true, it’s interesting that that call would be illegal in many European countries. And in many more you would at best get a „I can confirm this person worked on this position in this timeframe“
Hmm, interesting point, I did not know that. But, aside from that, while they cannot tell you that the candidate would not be ok, I did get hints on what to look out for.
I mean, you always have to take the previous employers' statements with a grain of salt, but if they say they really employed for just that project, it's also good info.
Europe is not a monolith. Lots of short stints is not unusual in London.
At startups? Sure. Several stints at non-startups? Well, how much of that time was spent learning the domain? Is that knowledge transferrable (probably not because of non-competition clause)? Why were you not happy at the previous employer?
I am not saying any of these don't have valid answers. What I am saying is that we would prefer juniors that are commited and do the hard work when the work gets hard. And, at least where I work now, this gets recognized, and they become seniors in time.
Indeed it used to be the norm since basically everyone worth hiring was a contractor prior to the IR35 debacle.
And we have the stock market to show for it.
I would not say that this is because of this point. It's because investors in Europe are more conservative. Employees are as well, it's true, so it's strange to have someone out of the norm. It's not a red flag per se, but it's a thing to be evaluated.
Andrej Karpathy is from Europe (Slovakia).
His point of origin is immaterial to my point. I was not commenting specifically for Mr. Karpathy. My point was generic.
Europe’s labor market is sadly still mostly out of touch with how startups work. It’s stuck in the last century. I’m not sure if this is due to tradition, or due to the fact that startups are much harder to start in Europe in general, so people on both sides of the hiring process have less experience with it.
Two years is more than long enough to join a startup, build 3 things, and see that your equity is never going to be worth anything, and find a new job. This isn’t anomalous or weird.
Europe is not a monolith and I don't know why people think it is. 2 years stints are not unusual at all in London.
It's about equity worth nothing jn Europe as an employee. Europe is a bad place for employees to join a startup. Lots of time people are attracted with shares/stars whatever. Only to find out they get nothing or are taxed to hell. There is a reason why Europe is failing.
London is economically, politically, geographically, and culturally fairly distinct from continental Europe.
If you're really in Europe then I'm sure you know that calling previous employers is completely pointless, the best you'll get is "yes this person has worked here before".
And I work in games and 2-3 years at each company is pretty normal, with some exceptions people just finish a project and then move(or are let go, unfortunately). YMMV of course.
Depends, but definitely not pointless. Though, I do have the benefit of working in a small country, so chances are that I will know of the company and perchance know folks that work there. Even if not, employers will still see fit to help each other, at least if they are not direct competitors.
> I work in games and 2-3 years at each company is pretty normal, with some exceptions people just finish a project and then move(or are let go, unfortunately). YMMV of course.
Yeah, being laid off every 2-3 years is a lot different from job hopping and shows exactly why the games industry is in its own little pocket of screwed in this market. Especially with games taking 3-5+ years to be made. How do you keep institutional knowledge when you kick it all out and basically start from scratch every cycle.
-sincerely, another game dev
The folks I know who bounce that often are generally mis-hires:
- barely qualified, leaving to avoid getting PIP'ed
- overqualified/under-leveled, and moving is faster than getting promoted
Even if that's true, 2 years is a huge amount of time to make real impact right now. By 2 years, we could have a clear winner of the AGI/ASI race.
This is such a disappointing reality that people believe this.
1) advancements in AI are made by large teams of brilliant people (and individuals who take outsized credit)
2) AGI is defintionless buzz word
3) advancements in AI will need significant changes in either how the model works or fundamentally new non existent datasets.
lol this is just not true sorry.
Claude code was one person's idea as a pet project and now it's singlehandedly 5x'd Anthropic's valuation. Sometimes single people matter, that's life.
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.
Source: https://www.axios.com/2026/05/19/anthropic-openai-karpathy-a...
Specifically it looks like he's planning to extend the ideas from https://github.com/karpathy/autoresearch into a larger effort towards recursive training improvement [1]:
> Excited to welcome Andrej to the Pretraining team! He'll be building a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pretraining research itself. I can’t think of anyone better suited to do it — looking forward to what we build together!
[1] https://x.com/nickevanjoseph/status/2056760504949842219
Why do they need this when they have the next gen mythos? Surely that can manage everything?
You don't understand: no ones ever reading more than 1% of the training material; so they need someone who has reduced that to 0.1%. The less you know, the more you know!
the glorified marketer framing in this thread is missing the bigger signal. karpathy publicly pausing eureka labs to join anthropic is an ai founder of his caliber effectively conceding that verticals get eaten by frontier upgrades.for everyone here building on top of foundation, that's the actual news
How serious was Eureka labs anyway? It seemed like essentially a banner for him messing around with content creation
people often found businesses to write off expensive purchases. my friend has a "company" which does nothing but he wrote off a $5000 MBP for this business expenses...
He’s a great educator and seems like a genuinely nice guy, at least on interviews. I hope he continues with his teaching career on the side, although the crazy amount of NDAs he probably had to sign may make that effort a bit difficult.
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.
Good for him, his public work these last ~1-2 years has been influential for me, as I'm sure it has for others.
I even share his concern about struggling to keep pace with the rate of change lately, and agree that my working in a frontier lab or any other such environment would certainly help with that!
I have a weird background mix of analytic philosophy, linguistics/NLP, propaganda research, and long-term institutional data science/strategy work, which unfortunately does not make ATS systems especially low-friction as I try to jump industries.
So I keep busy the best I can: lately building tooling around runtime observability, intent legibility, and intervention in LLM systems.
Some small public artifacts finally going up: https://huggingface.co/spaces/anotheruserishere/Cartogemma
Eh. Worth a shot!
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
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 this research into something very interesting.
p.s. called it
> 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. (https://www.axios.com/2026/05/19/anthropic-openai-karpathy-a...)
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.
Those projects are a complete joke. Neither of them were even original, people have been playing around with those ideas for well over a year.
They just became "famous" because Karpathy is effectively an AI celebrity, so he could throw shit at a wall and post it on X and it would get 10k Github stars.
But seriously, people have been using the models to tweak hyperparemeters, or using LLMs to help create a second brain using markdown or json files or 100X other combinations of files, for a long time already.
> just becomes a glorified marketer
That implies Karpathy is either dumb or desperate and he is neither of those by a long shot.
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.
Yea, I say this as a marketing agency owner, not a developer or AI researcher, that besides Sam Altman, Dario, Demis and Elon, that Karpathy is one of the most influential I follow.
There’s a lot of value for the business world in learning AI from someone who has been at the top of their game but now is doing a general service by being a great educator and translator between the fields.
His recent Wiki approach may be simple to devs but is certainly an aha moment for the rest of the peanut gallery paying attention!
> 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.
Hasn't Carmack solved a few serious engineering problems, making Oculus more or less the most advanced VR device? (The fact that an advanced VR device does not seem to be needed by the mass market is not an engineering problem.)
Yes - but - ironically - he did that _before_ joining them. IIRC he literally started collaborating and helping them while being at a different company.
That seems surprisingly common to me. Visionary engineer has solution to problem, gets hired, solves the broad strokes in the first year, then spends N more years in meetings with exec stakeholders and worrying about schedules/hiring/financials instead of _doing the vision work_.
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.
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 (rich old guy marries hot young chick). Anthropic get a "glorified marketer", and he gets a front 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.
An employment relationship is transactional??? Like the employer pays money and the employee provides labor???
Scandalous!
Maybe poor choice of words on my part - what I meant was that this doesn't appear to be a case of AI research co. hires AI researcher to do AI research.
A regular marriage is transactional to some extent too right, but not quite the same as Anna Nicole Smith marrying a 90yr old.
As an aside, an Indian guy I used to work with once explained to me how traditional Indian arranged marriages, like his own, work, and they are HIGHLY transactional. It's not just a matter of same caste, same social status etc, but an explicit trade off. In my co-worker's case he cheerfully told me how his wife was very dark skinned, therefore considered not that attractive/desirable (to other Indians!), but her family had money and social status so it was considered a fair trade for a nice looking boy like himself!
> That implies Karpathy is either dumb or desperate and he is neither of those by a long shot.
No it implies that he is more valuable for being famous than the hands-on work he can produce. This is the IC endgame
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.
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.
> 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
Yes, that's probably his dumbest public idea to date. Given that this GPT repos and parts of autoresearch are brilliant I'm sympathetic. I think he's earned the right to exhibit mild expressions of AI psychosis at this point.
And, my objection was that he clearly had no understanding of the supply-chain risk he was worsening by advocating widespread use of Obsidian for agentic engineering tasks.
Since his announcement, Obsidian has taken proactive steps to mitigate the risks, or at least study threat model. Hopefully, they will implement proper RBAC or something before someone else with his visibility announces an even more irresponsible half-baked idea.
Why is this dumb? Please educate those of us less brilliant than you!
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.
he's not dumb or desperate compared to the average person, but it's very possible to be dumb and desperate compared to the delusional promises and outsized amounts of money in the industry. Manages to make smart people look extremely stupid every day.
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.
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.
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
And it makes a lot of sense, doesn't?.
There are things that you can only explore and learn in those places, for obvious reasons.
I don't know his personal life goals but he's a great communicator and educator, if this decision makes him more up to date, and allows him to create even more relevant content then is something everyone will benefit. I understand the risks of being bias toward one company and not the other, but if you look at the content he created so far, he always talk principle first and specific tool later.
I think people here should give him the benefit of the doubt.
i meant everything out of respect for andrej. it's no different from how a visiting scholar can be great marketing for an institution
Greedy is enough. Neither dumb nor desperate needed for this.
Anyone who would voluntarily work for Musk when he went obviously has things going on that aren't great.
It's also hard to any hard research on your own without resources. At best a few gpus can only go so far right now.
yes stop kidding yourself that he is going in as a tech leader in terms of providing technical innovation..at that stage its your persona that matters not the tech (sure I think Anthropic is going to listen to his advice..but its a transactional marketing win primarly)
his value to Anthropic is his influence..he has over 2 million followers, and value is that he is the Top influencer for AI right now, like it or not. just like Selena Gomez might be for top for women age 21-29...
Every AI nerd I know reposts his (very thoughtful posts and projects mind you) like religon
> 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'
He may not be a brilliant researcher, but he is a brilliant teacher. I am glad he is joining Anthropic so he can stay up to date with the next round of things that he will teach :)
It is a pity we don't hear more about the truly brilliant researchers.
All we hear is Altman, Musk, ...
The self drive on my Tesla is damn near perfect. I haven’t driven my car in around 6 months.
FWIW while Karpathy was at Tesla he was basically working on the vision component. The actual driving component (using vision as an input) was originally all C++. They may have started migrating parts of the driving component from C++ to neural networks while Karpathy was there, but most of it happened after he left in 2022, with the big switch being FSD 12 in 2024. User reports from before/after FSD 12 are like night and day.
I was never convinced by the "vision only" approach - I don't see the point of throwing out or refusing to have additional data from other sensors.
I suppose that with modern ML they can just toss it in the blender and reap the benefits ...
I'm not talking about vision (cameras) vs lidar etc, just the Tesla FSD architecture that separates the "vision" component (turning camera/sensor inputs into symbolic road/sign/vehicle/pedestrian/etc data), and the driving component which takes the vision data, plus current location and destination, and uses that to actually drive the car - switch lanes, make turns, avoid obstacles etc etc.
Tesla self driving works. I don’t know if Karpathy deserves credit for that or not.
Tesla self driving kind of works. In a very similar way to how it kind of worked back in 2016. It's better than it was in 2016, don't get me wrong. But even today they haven't solved the problem and Karpathy left in 2022. And other companies notably have actually surpassed Tesla over that time. I don't think anyone could reasonably say he walked away in 2022 because he thought the job was finished.
Yes, no driver needed at all. Your Tesla makes money for you while you sleep at home.
I somehow felt he, along with Andrew Ng, are very few well-known AI experts that are left behind on the money side during the AI-gets-me-super-rich crazy time, unfortunately.
Only if you think B is an important thing. He is easily > $100M from Tesla.
Andrew Ng has been investing in AI startups for almost a decade, I would be very surprised if this rising tide left him behind.
I can't speak for Andrew Ng - but my take is he did out of pure altruism - love. just in terms of advancing free education e.g coursera & the free machine learning courses etc he brought to the masses.
not everyone does things to be rich.
> 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?
Well Karpathy left in 2017, and all the sort of commercial stuff didn't happen till a while later - for example they set up the structure to take external money in 2019 and that's obviously the point at which they'd found the pathway that justified doing massive training runs and all that. So Karpathy was out very early (left at the point that Musk thought OpenAI had basically failed).
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.
GPT-1 presumably, which was released a year after he left. Prior to focusing on GPT, OpenAI was pursuing a lot of research directions.
The inflection is Right before its meteoric rise.
Or they collude by hiring each others engineers as a way to create manageable competition and information sharing outside their fiduciary duty to shareholders.
DevRel or whatever we call that now
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
I read this as a bad sign for Anthropic. Relying yet again on more hype instead of improving products.
OpenAI’s hiring recently has been much stronger, whether through luck or structure. The “no-name” guys have actual taste. I love that. I don’t care that they’re no-names.
I don’t know Karpathy personally, I won’t speak bad about a man I don’t know. I hope he makes CC better. I just read this as hype. My point is that there’s nothing he has that an empowered no-name product manager doesn’t. It’s like Alex Wang at Meta. That acq didn’t redeem Meta. They actually lost LeCun. Where’s Llama today?
Regardless of what Anthropic’s share price is, OpenAI has been fucking killing it recently. I don’t take particular pleasure in saying that, i’ve been a google and gemini guy for years
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.
>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.
I’m hoping Karpathy will make Claude Code better, in the meantime I’m super happy seeing a small product manager like Tibo fucking crushing it on Codex
Where are you following the comings and goings of small no name product managers like it's a baseball team?
clearly the employees that tweet the most must also have the best contributions to R&D... </sarcasm>
Hahaha wdym? Where have you been dude?
Joking aside, there are small communities pushing codex and AI to the bleeding edge of what's possible.
Here I'll give you an example. The last few updates from Boris at CC have been tweaks to the system prompt to make it use less compute, effectively making the system dumber, making it tell you to go to bed. I mean come on! Tibo has been impressing me, bc they're building the things these small communities are building.
One of the things these bleeding edge guys and girls have been working on is a /goal feature, essentially ralph loops. Codex released it as a feature the other day. I can't help but be impressed. As an ex-pm, this is product management.
Then you take a look at what the Chinese are doing on their own forums, and it just makes what Google and Anthropic are doing look outdated. OpenAI feels competitive, which I like. What's coming will not be kind to us, we adapt or we die.
Anthropic has had goal for a bit.
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.
OpenAI seems to be dumping a LOT of money into marketing on social media at least.
To be fair, Mythos is probably one of the most significant marketing pushes in the industry in both impact and investment.
I am sure there is an element of reality in it's capabilities, but there's also a significant amount of "We don't have the compute to handle this at scale", and "look look, we have the best model. It's so good that you can't even compare it to other models. That is how good we are."
I’m noticing a real disconnect in the user base about this
The Claude maximalists that can never see any wrong in anything and the users that care about actual capability
These guys are going to be in for a rude awakening when the Chinese are steamrolling us with data centers you can see from space and better models, Amodei will tell you that himself
Hey, it's not like the Chinese have a serious demographic crisis they can't cope with, and their only hope is to significantly increase productivity per worker.
Anthropic as well. The private equity partnerships for guaranteed users are going to make their numbers look great.
I’ve been using Claude and Codex extremely heavily and use adblockers so I don’t see them
I think they mean the paid shills
Whenever I see a user base turn against actual users or imply censorship or discredit actual experiences it always ends in a death spiral: Deny -> Product stops improving -> Censor -> Die
Adapt or die
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 product iterations, 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’s extremely compute intensive, but also very satisfying.
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
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
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.
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.
Furthermore, he was extremely hireable with numerous job opportunitys available to him. He would not be destitute or even particularly worse off if he did quit for ethical reasons. Any self-preservation defense is also invalid.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/20/tesla-hires-deep-learning-...
Andrej Karpathy is a reason* Tesla doesn’t have Lidar and thus is a reason Tesla self driving isn’t nearly as safe as it could be?
He heard Elon say “I drive with eyes, so cars just need eyes” & shipped?
:( happy to have my impressions corrected (but I was kind of pretending it’s a 2026 scenario where you could slap Lidar, ship a Waymo, if you were just willing to spend the friggin MONEY - 2017 was too early for most any “self” driving IIRC)
-
*edit - in a scenario where his refusal to skip Lidar catalyzed change
I don't the comp sci has the same requirements for ethics coursework like mechanical, aerospace, etc..
According to ABET they do if they want the degree to be accredited. We had two classes for my SE degree. From Criterion 3. Student Outcomes:
"2. an ability to apply engineering design to produce solutions that meet specified needs with consideration of public health, safety, and welfare, as well as global, cultural, social, environmental, and economic factors." "4. an ability to recognize ethical and professional responsibilities in engineering situations and make informed judgments, which must consider the impact of engineering solutions in global, economic, environmental, and societal contexts."
https://www.abet.org/accreditation/accreditation-criteria/cr...
Passing a mandatory class != believing in its message and acting on it.
Unfortunately, rather important courses like engineering ethics have become lumped in with mandatory DEI objectives and similar 'grievance studies' requirements, classes which many suffer through quietly, regurgitating the Correct responses while they count the minutes until they can get back to more substantive classwork. Some undergraduates may unfortunately gloss over ethics just as they gloss over lectures on privilege.
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.
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.
Well, one big difference now is that you need to billions to become the next big player. The barriers to entry are incredibly high, if you plan on competing against the big players.
Of course, there could be some future lab or startup which completely revolutionizes the field by going for some approach that doesn't require a boatload of money to train a model, but for now, we're stuck with the LLMs and the costs they come with..
OpenAI will be the Yahoo of AI. Starting off as a household name, but fades to irrelevancy as competitors take over.
Google is much better positioned long term with their TPUs and separate enormous revenue from advertising.
Not so sure on the advertising front. B2C is now mostly social media, and Google doesn't own any. That's why the pivoted hard to YouTube shorts to try and capture that segment, but it is nowhere near TikTok or Instagram. Case in point, Meta's advertising revenue is predicted to surpass Google's this year.
You underestimate that YouTube has become what TV was for the majority of young people. Premium is relatively lucrative - but the ad revenue is insane. If Google can succeed in building an AI to generate slop to hold eyeballs fixed on the screen and cut out creators it will be a highly profitable dystopia. Facebook is similarly positioned (via Instagram - not Facebook itself) while TikTok is in a highly unpredictable state with the recent acquisition. Oracle may stay hands off and treat it as a golden goose but that hasn't been the recent track record for anyone with the surname Ellison.
So Google remains as Google
So we get ad flooded useless AIs?
But do I leave all my money in US index funds?
It's the safer bet.
You are now my financial advisor
Which funds?
Searching “invest $10[0]k into USA index funds low fees”, the Vanguard funds that come up! (Vanguard sounds a little special, maybe they do good marketing. Ah, per Wiki: “Vanguard is owned by the funds managed by the company and is therefore owned by its customers.”)
Looking familiar: VTI or VOO, VTSAX or VFIAX
you might consider VXUS for int'l / hardware exposure (20-40% of total)
Maybe just like one of each.
That's a funny thing to say as time is infinite, and we're at the early stages of every single thing. Reasoning in time dynamics is useful though to be clear
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.
If you look at his recent content, I think he's gotten LLM Psychosis unfortunately
Hypothetically you take the leading expert of a field and say "they believe in their own field too much - far more than I do as a layman - and therefore surely must have psychosis."
Why should I trust that your assessment is correct? Is it likely to ever be correct in the case of a doctor/mechanical engineer/athlete/economist/whatever? So why do so many people insist that an incredibly intelligent AI researcher has fallen into some obvious trap?
Because we're paying attention? A lot of "smart" people are lost in the AI sauce, grandstanding that they are going to change the very fabric of society. Generally leading experts in other fields are not making the same hyperbolic, self-indulgent, embarrassing statements.
At risk of being "lost in the AI sauce", do you seriously believe that AI isn't actively changing the fabric of society? Almost feels like we're living in totally different realities if that isn't clear-cut
Have you considered that maybe the experts in a field are actually correct about that field?
Honestly, if Skynet were possible, Anthropic would probably build it first and claim they had to because OpenAI is bad.
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.
yeah but i don't think there's any large org which is 'good guys'. Anyone who wants to become a monopoly or very very large is probably suffering from some sort of a neural condition (psychosis, if plural) which we will study 100 years from now. Right now they are rewarded but I think our little minds forget to take the negative externalities into account.
I am working on a short story on this topic which is set in 2100s, where most humans have internalized the concept of 'having enough' after the great conflict. But some specimen have started to show signs of this syndrome again, and neuroscientists and psychologists are grappling to understand where it originated from.
The difference is that Anthropic pretend they're the good guys, while the rest don't.
Anthropic has drawn lines with the most powerful organization in the world, that OpenAI capitulated on within hours for a small contract.
100% and that was bold and set a good example, at least from the outside.
...and then silently got back to talks with DoD [0] and gave them the Mythos model. Separately, they went back on their promise to only develop models that they can guarantee are safe [1]. I reckon considering which country they are HQ'ed in, building skynet is in their destiny.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/01/pentagon-anthropic-blacklist...
[1] https://www.techradar.com/ai-platforms-assistants/anthropic-...
Skynet is being built on the Ukrainian/Russian front lines.
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
Anthropic is also now complicit in poisoning Memphis by using Colossus.
There is no room for trying to make any of these companies or their employees out as 'the good guys'.
It feels like every single tweet he makes is a hit
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.
> creating magic everywhere they go
Like specifically what has he done?
I can spare a minute :). This isn't exhaustive because this is just stuff I know of, obviously.
- At Stanford, Led research on the first (to my knowledge) crop of joint image/text models. Super widely cited work.
- At Tesla, led their whole self driving effort for a while, came up with critical techniques that allowed them to make progress (e.g., the concept of "auto labelling": using a much larger NN to generate training data with which to train smaller models that could fit in the on-device compute. IIRC, Elon said they would not have been able to make progress without this insight).
I'm not sure his educative efforts for the mold of what you're looking for, but if so, the course he designed at Stanford (and availed online):for neural networks, as well as his blog posts, (most famous of which, to my knowledge, is "the unreasonable effectiveness of LSTMs"), made a huge impact on educating a generation of tinkerers and researchers.
Add microgpt to that list
It wasn't LSTMs, it was RNNs.
Thanks for correcting the title I misremembered. Fwiw, the article did culminate with LSTMs: https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/
---------------------
EDIT: It looks like you deleted the part of your post I quoted below. So feel free to ignore my question about it, I guess.
---------------------
Not sure what you mean by
> Shows how much you know
Do you mean that the fact that I misremembered a word on the title suggests that I know very little about Karpathy's contributions to the field of neural networks?
Thank you!
I was more looking for signal that him + Anthropic might yield something beyond a step-change from Opus 4.7 (disappointing so far). We have not gotten to use Mythos yet, I wonder if that will become Opus 5 or something.
Anyone else fearing Anthropic more and more each day? Not from a perspective that they are doing so well, but rather that it's like an industry tornado, sucking up and destroying everything in it's path.
Name three things they destroyed?
1-3) my free time (too busy using Claude Code)
1. Bun
2. Stainless
3. Coefficient Bio
bonus #4. the global economy
1. Bun is right there on Github. You can download can use it right now.
2. Sure, that's one thing.
3. Coefficient Bio is not a thing. They don't have a product. Ever. It's just Anthropic hired 10 people for a ridiculous amount of premium bonus. (Time will prove it's a bad decision, btw)
4. (snorts)
I believe the Bun reference is the Rust "rewrite" that came up recently.
Selfishly, I hope this doesn't reduce to 0 the amount of time he spends doing educational content, which seems like a particular strength of his. I presume this means Eureka Labs is not releasing any product or course.
Wondering what the plan is to steward Eureka Labs, LLM101n, and whatever else was being cooked up. As a fellow educator, was very much looking forward to seeing how this would have evolved things.
> I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.
"However, it turns out, my deep passion can easily be put on hold with money. Also I'm not really sure what the definition of passionate is."
interesting signal about where AI is...
It actually feels like a signal that it is in a tapering phase.
As in, if it was in a growth phase a freeform, solo - collab with who you want, would be more beneficial. But in a tapering phase you'd want structure and to be in the private formal meetings.
just an idea
Or, you could fit the exactly opposite story to the same data:
Growth is when you want to have institutional support, to be at the tip, backed by infinite money and best compute infra, and benefit disproportionally from compounding. Conversely tapering is when you're best flying under the radar, and there's plenty of value both in ideas and in hardware, as the leading players shed excess they can't support anymore, ...
Feels like the opposite.
Stuff is still happening and you need to be part of a big lab to see it. NanoGPT is fun but at some point you need that datacenter.
AI news and ESPN feels interchangeable sometimes.
I’ve never seen names be big in the industry in this way before. It used to be founders, now it’s personalities.
I'll reserve judgement until I've heard what ThePrimeagen and simonw have to say about this.
This gave me a good laugh because we don’t know what to think until Jon Blow says, “Here’s the thing.”
I'll reserve judgement until I've read what HN commenters have to say about this.
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.
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.
Ooh, if there is a market for someone to be the Stephen A Smith here, I am waiting by the phone. I AM WAITING BY THE PHONE I mean.
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.
Wouldn't be surprised if companies with too much "superstar" talent suffer from the same issues as sport teams usually do.
But you won't be stuck in Bristol, CT covering AI news.
"I'm taking my talents to South Market"
Good for him. His learning materials are unmatched, but I don’t think there was a viable path with his educational company.
A viable path to becoming a billionaire or a viable path to build something that met its goal? There are several notable educational content companies that run on quite minimal budgets once they have the platform and other (mostly) capital expenditures taken care of.
Anthropic is on a roll:
- best harness overall (well maybe until like a month ago when gpt5.5 and codex came out)
- acquires bun
- acquires stainless for SDKs
- deal with Elon for compute
- karpathy
what else did I miss?
1. Best harness? It ranks the worst with Opus in terminalbench: https://www.tbench.ai/leaderboard/terminal-bench/2.0?models=...
2. Mixed for the entire bun ecosystem, especially with the Rust, Anthropic-focused rewrite
3. Good, because Anthropic's SDK was one of the worst ones to use.
4. Deal with the guy that has a shit ton of compute around wasting money because no-one uses Grok and was frequently calling Anthropic "Misanthropic".
https://i.redd.it/kp4uy1egspjg1.png
5. Glorified marketer whose probably greatest achievement in pushing AI forward was instructing on CS 231n and coining the term vibe coding.
Yeah, on a roll.
You're not entirely wrong but your snide tone is annoying and unsuitable for this platform. Anyway,
1. Claude Code is widely used and beloved despite not benchmaxxing on the terminalbench like these harnesses that nobody has ever heard of or uses.
5. Karpathy's contributions are way more than CS 231n and coining vibe coding. In terms of pedagogy, his "zero to hero" videos, nanoGPT, etc, are all great. For actual work, he also built a great org at Tesla.
NTA but Claude Code is everything but beloved. It's incredibly meh, very buggy (to that extend that customers were literally losing money), heavily vibecoded and all around just... bad. I appreciate it for kickstarting the whole terminal agent thing and I would still use it but only because Anthropic mandates it for using Claude with your subscription.
Yep, sadly the case, been using Codex CLI a lot lately and it somehow feels more... refined. Gemini is just tragic.
they invented MCP, Skills, made these standards open so anyone could build the harness around them.
MCP is barely an invention. It's a fuzzy spec detailing a pretty obvious design pattern.
LLM is barely an invention. It's an auto complete we had years before.
Also I'm a little bitter, prior to this I never had trouble getting my username on websites. No one used this combination of 4 letters for godamn anything.
All gone, for shitty typeahead
this pre-IPO is gonna be incredible
It's going to be dramatic - it's unclear how much of their DAUs are organic and how much is through their PE usage deals. There's a large amount of organic usage certainly, it's a useful tool, but there are quite a few of the tell tale signs that they have an internal number they want their user acquisition to be at and they're failing to meet that through organic growth.
To be fair, MCP and Skills do not have any source code. It is fundamentally impossible to release either standard without making it open.
Tim Abbott the Zulip guy.
Interesting if his educational startup turned out to be less perspective at least with the current gen of llms.
I wonder if the timing of this, coming so soon after the Musk/Anthropic data center deal is just coincidence or not?
From Karpathy's various interviews I get the impression that he wants to leave the door open to working for Musk again at some point, perhaps on TeslaBot.
With Musk for now regarding Anthropic as a partner (or at least an enemy of his enemy), that seems to mean that Karpathy joining them is less likely to anger Musk than might otherwise have been the case. Who knows, maybe Karpathy was involved in brokering this data center deal?
Thanks for introducing me to xcancel
Looks like they sprinkled their ipo money on him.
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.
This just in: AI Superstar tweets about new stint. Crowd goes wild. News at eleven.
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?
Anyone want to comment on what it's like to work for Anthropic (as an ordinary software/AI engineer, not as Karpathy)?
Compare and contrast with working at OpenAI, Google, etc.?
That nobody does hints at the NDA structure.
He should have done his own lab. He seems like someone capable of it and might bring some unique ideas.
If you don't actually have the desire to build, lead, and manage a large organization, this is a terrible idea for technical geniuses. A guy like him will instantly raise $1 billion which means hiring dozens of people, which means tons of interviews, management, performance review, planning, board meetings, etc etc.
It's good that there are avenues today for people to make tens or hundreds of $m in salaried positions at companies so that they don't have to do that stuff to get paid their value if they don't genuinely want to.
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
> 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.
He can be at the frontier while just having a regular job. Every other option is a lot more work.
Access to a million GPUs?
Make a lot of money.
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.
Mo money, mo problems. Just let the dude work, he’s not starving and he’s probably enjoying his life not completely wrapped up in the stress that running a company in this market must be.
Congrats Andrej. Let me know if you are looking for someone to take over Eureka Labs. We were in the same WoW classic guild. domrdy on x. We can duel for it :). Also, I need $10M if any VCs are reading this.
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.
I mean he is basically an influencer at this point? I guess this is a marketing play and we will be hearing more from him than ever.
What's your guess, how much stock / cash he got?
(I also assume they gave him a ton of independence in R&D)
I think this signals game over in the arms race.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But surely being part of the birth of AGI would be more interesting than sitting on a yacht, which you can do for the rest of your life post AGI?
The implications of what AGI would do to the economy has a high chance of mass civil unrest. Just the announcement could set it off. If you had the resources you won’t want to be around for it.
Andrej has decided to become a billionaire. Anthropic keeps preparing for the IPO. I wish they IPO soon, let everyone see how the earnings look like.
Great person and great company
I hope he still gets to do some educative stuff on the side too
I would like to announce I've retired. The tech industries are screwed and the future is paper.
good name recognition for Anthropic mega IPO. everything Anthropic does now is all gear toward its IPO from buying Bun, Stainless, getting big name AI guy to join...etc.
Hope he can teach Claude how to not be so lame at coding.
I have respect for Karpathy. Not for anyone who made Claude or promotes it. So this is a shame. But I can't fault anyone for accepting an offer with (I assume) lots of 0's in the dollar part.
Honestly happy he’s back at a foundation lab. He will have insane impact there. Of course one of the best educators in the world it’s a bit sad he gave up building and education tool.
Who cares mate?
This is an extremely valid opinion.
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.
Apple’s software defects can be comically bad. Software overall though, you may overstate.
I understand where you are coming from, but at least when I was there, we were still trying to develop solutions that had never been implemented at that scale before (just like Anthropic today). I helped create the first version of Visual Studio (Boston). People tend to forget that even by the 90s we still didn't really understand how to solve a lot of the main technical problems. That's what I loved about the work. Everything seems easy/obvious after the fact.
When I left MS, a full Windows build was about 18M LOC. The fact that 18 million lines of code, written by tens of thousands of engineers, worked at all was a mini miracle.
With regard to compensation: like Karpathy, I had already earned enough to be comfortable for the rest of my life. Once money stopped being the primary driver, I was able to focus on what made me happy. Building things, even if you don't like them, brought me happiness and fulfillment. I hope Andrej finds the same at Anthropic.
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.
> the bet on camera-only driven system did not pay off
This is a pretty unsubstantiated claim. Tesla is now launching robotaxis at a fraction of the cost of Waymos, in part because they don't need all the Lidar.
Let's say it is an opinion.
But Tesla has been promising full self-driving "next year" for quite a long time now, and it seems they are stuck at the "95% there" stage basically forever.
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
Money always wins.
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.
As a OpenAI founder he already is long past the point of money being a consideration.
It's the only way he could get more tokens beyond the Max 20x plan lol.
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.
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 can play by myself, or i can join some friends, and make the play more joyful
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?
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?
True.
Why is this title not editorialized like others when it's ambiguous?
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.
hell will freeze over before anthropic release anything meaningful to the public
Congrats to Karpathy. I wonder whether this is the right time to join Anthropic. Looks like it from the outside.
But - unpopular opinion - I believe Anthropic is one open-source model away (that can code well) from a massive revenue/stock crash. We're already seeing Claude's cost escalate to astronomical levels. Most coding work is medium difficulty in the grand scheme of things. So the future is an open source model small enough to fit in your local 16GB VRAM, giving you a Claude Code like experience for zero token cost. That's going to wipe out most of Anthropic's current revenue base. It does have several cool initiatives in the pipeline, but bad things happen once your bread and butter is threatened (just ask OpenAI).
I heavily weight the explosive revenue growth of Anthropic and OpenAI above speculation about what open source models may do in the future. I've heard for over 6 months that there's no moat but the revenue growth keeps proving it wrong. Opinions have to adjust to meet reality. There's some kind of moat, for now at least, that is not being appreciated in the conventional wisdom.
(If they were just burning Capex and nobody wanted to use their product or their gross margins were bad then I'd agree with you)
Your opinion also holds weight. In fact, I've been in your camp throughout, only having changed my mind in the last few weeks. I've seen legitimate instances of Anthropic costs surprising medium to large enterprises, so that's a demand shock. On the supply side, I've seen some very intense benchmarking going on at r/LocalLlama (the #1 community for opensource LLM tinkering IMO). It just feels like we're in a powder keg right now.
Model diversity is really their weak point. OpenAI has embeddings, audio, image, video (RIP). Anthropic has ... Claude. It's a great model for a lot of things, but it's super risky to just have one thing you're good at (from a business standpoint).
GLM 5.1 is almost there. These guys should be scared. The valuations these companies have is insanity.
Not in extended sessions, I've noticed. It's good at targeted edits, but not "build a small tool that XYZ".
those models are light years away from opus or sonnett right now though -- is the context problem really solvable?
absolutely not, take Kimi K2.6 for a spin
Looks like the one sector of the commercial AI world that will outlast the open source - local hardware transition is the military-industrial sector. I wonder what kind of classification-security rating is needed these days for onboarding?
“According to reports from The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian, the AI model Claude, developed by Anthropic, was used in the initial U.S.-Israel military operations against Iran in late February 2026. The system, integrated into a platform developed by defense contractor Palantir, assisted with intelligence analysis, scenario planning, and targeting for strikes that resulted in the death of Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei”
https://biggo.com/news/202603032121_Anthropic_Claude_AI_Used...
Immense respect for Karpathy but are these people that optimistic about AI?
I mean short gig, few million dollars for Karpathy so makes sense for him but others should read the Cloudflare's report about the super scary model that Anthropic wouldn't release because they love humanity more than their balance sheet.
And now, a message from an actual deck chair on the Titanic
He's a good educator, sometimes. But these days it seems like he's mostly gone of the deep end of being an LLM salesman.
Andrej: Guys, thank you for the interest but I'm really focused on this education thing rn
Anthropic: Okay, let's add two zeroes
Andrej: I am very excited to join Anthropic!
(I do not blame him, I think this is reasonable, I find the whole money-falling-from-the-sky thing amusing :-)
Smart move
Well at least he knows what not to do now.
Somebody got showered with stock options.
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.
Guys ...
Skynet is winning.
whatever happened at Eureka labs?
hahahaha
Recently on the all in podcast, they talked about how Anthropic is probably the next big monopoly. Given how quickly they have been growing and all of the products they are pushing out rapidly (even if they are sloppy), the acquisitions, and the people they are hiring, it feels like that may actually end up being true.
But what is the solution? I don’t think it is safe for a society built on free speech and other liberal values to have a couple extremely powerful companies controlling all our information and imposing their rules and their politics on top of us. It was bad enough under the FAANG companies. This will be worse.
Personally I’m not comfortable with how much power Anthropic is accumulating. And with them partnering shamelessly with Elon Musk to use a datacenter powered by potentially illegal natural gas turbines, I feel like Dario is just not trustworthy.
Imagine taking their word as gospel lmao.
https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/2056753169888334312
didnt he foreshadow this in a recent interview? lmao
My personal update: just quit playing modded Minecraft. Thinking of downloading Apex Legends. What is everyone doing?
Well, I am listening.
very interesting news... we are living in exciting times.
This guy is the next Ted Bundy.
Someone who already over a year ago said that he barely touches keyboard does not really have my confidence as a tech person.