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!
Am I the only one who wasn’t particularly impressed by AutoResearch? If you looked at what the agent was actually doing, it was just tuning parameters mostly, not really trying different novel approaches.
I couldn’t help myself but consider this mostly a very inefficient variant of hyperparameter optimization, but someone correct me if I’m wrong, I may be looking at this too pessimistic.
I didn't dig into what the actual repository was doing, but personally, I took some inspiration from the idea after reading about it and realizing that I might have been underestimating the ability of LLMs. I put a bit more work into a performance harness I was using locally and just set some agents to brainstorming and they did seem to find some great stuff. So I don't really have a stance one way or another on this specific repo, but the general idea seems like a really good one.
Karpathy embedded within an organization is way more impressive than him out on his own with hot takes and little projects. I hope he does great things for Anthropic.
Absolutely, I wasn’t saying that him being at Anthropic wasn’t going to be effective, I just think his little projects wouldn’t be very interesting if his name wasn’t attached to them.
More like he'll blog and tweet about using Claude and get gullible software engineers to buy Claude subscriptions and work on their own obsolescence while paying for it.
Many people are still deluded and think he is the same person who wrote the informal AI tutorials in plain html. He isn't, he is selling stuff now.
I'm as jaded as can be but I think Anthropic is now beyond the point where they'd place much value on farming Karpathy's name recognition. I'm sure they considered it an extra plus in his hiring package but they wouldn't do the level of comp package he'd want if they didn't believe the odds were decent that he'll contribute serious value.
Sure, it can always not work out but that's no more a risk with him than any high-profile hire who doesn't really need the money and will always have other options.
What is he selling? How is this time different compared to when he was at OpenAI or at Tesla? You could say he was shilling those products too. I don't see any shift. He's still posted free in depth YouTube videos recently.
Is that a serious question? He already promoted vibe coding and AI hype. Now he is literally there to promote Anthropic and its IPO price.
When he was at OpenAI it wasn't overtly commercial yet. At Tesla he had a way lower profile. Now he is the vibe coding Jesus for deluded software engineers. The impact is much larger.
He was literally rolled out in front of camera as Tesla's AI prodigy at multiple streamed events designed to appeal to techy consumers and dev recruitment. He's definitely been one of AI's public personas for a long time now, and his employers have regularly aided/directed/utilized him accordingly.
Speaking of, how did he not lose credibility at “full self driving next year, better buy it now”-Tesla?
It might be Elon who went and said that and said they don’t need lidar, but as director of AI and auto vision Karpathy bears the responsibility for those features.
>Speaking of, how did he not lose credibility at “full self driving next year, better buy it now”-Tesla?
That I also want to know. He bailed out of Tesla right when the limitations of his "LIDAR-less cameras only self driving" system were becoming obvious, and nobody asked him about the hindsight of this obvious fuckup.
>but as director of AI and auto vision Karpathy bears the responsibility for those features.
Exactly. You lead the R&D, so it's on you. If your boss makes stupid decisions in public overriding your best judgement, the leave and go somewhere where your decisions be respected. The ML market was red hot for people like him back then so it's not like he didn't have alternatives.
Although I doubt Elon forced that idea on him, since he's the one who was confidently claiming that vision only is better since Lidar pollutes the sensor fusion data.
With a cursory glance at Tesla's hardware the rest of the self driving car industry quickly surmised that it was at the time nowhere near sufficient to to deliver L4 autonomy, and that's before sensor modalities entered the equation. Karpathy was either BSing for money, or he actually believed the hype. Either way it was a bad look.
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!
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.
The warm up rounds to filter out the fluffy includes asking what is a Matrix, do this calculation, what is a LLM. 2nd round include stuff like explain the binary search algorithm, write a double linked list in C, and a take home project.
Would have been great to hear that his inability to do the interview memorization bullshit as a senior was why he didn't get hired somewhere like OpenAI. lol.
Except the good companies probably dont make you do silly stupid outdated interview practices without the tools you can actually use on the job today, right?
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.
> 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.
There's a choice to be made between helpfully defeating someone's ATS and searching for more clueful employers. I'll probably be walking paper resumes into local offices next time around anyhow.
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.
“Master Control Program’s been snapping up all us programs who believe. If he thinks you’re useful, he takes over all your functions so he gets bigger.”
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.
Yes. I think Anthropic's success with claude code + cowork and the way it's shredding through white-collar work is basically cementing the thesis of Geoffrey Hinton's latest paper (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s12559-026-105...). I highly recommend reading it in full, but briefly:
1. Copernican Revolution -> We aren't the center of the universe
2. The Darwinian Revolution -> We aren't the pinnacle of life
3. The Freudian Revolution -> We aren't even in control of our own minds
4. The "Intuitive AI" Revolution -> We aren't the only form of intelligence
I think even a month ago I would've read this article and scoffed, but having used Claude Code almost exclusively at work for the last couple months it seems pretty undeniable that in-context-learning and a good enough harness is all you need to displace most "thinking" jobs that require just a bachelors. The hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into data center build-out basically hinges on this thesis, and frankly I trust the judgements of the billionaires financing these deals better than LLM-naysayers on hackernews (not to mention the non-public info they have access to). You don't need to reach superintelligence to still deeply, deeply affect society, and I think Anthropic was the first to build products that are actually good enough and, critically, hands-off enough to do just this. Every day it's clearer and clearer to me that "I was born into a poor family but am relatively intelligent and good at learning things, therefore I can find success" is exactly what will ultimately be eliminated as the outcome of this unless we get the government to step in and regulate.
I could go on and on, but the main point I'm trying to make is that you should definitely examine unease you feel about Anthropic, consider framing that unease in the context of Hinton's argument, and ask yourself what the implications may be.
Not really. I mean it’s not like they are particularly far ahead. Maybe a small lead on model performance, but nothing particularly significant. All the major players are within 6 months of each other. As soon as model improvements plateau there will be no observable difference between providers.
2. Most entry level jobs for current graduates in white collar fields. (See hiring rates for these positions)
3. Thousands of layoffs (mostly attributed to AI use, while not 100%, the Anthropic's specific marketing push has a huge influence on this - unlike OAI and other labs)
4. All low-code products/startups
5. Web agencies who did small websites for local businesses
While AI industry push is there for all of the above, Anthropic's specific marketing/PR is specifically directed towards forced adoption of AI and burning tokens, unlike from other labs.
Hmmm… maybe. I think not. It really depends on your other claims below, with which I mostly disagree.
2. Most entry level jobs for current graduates in white collar fields. (See hiring rates for these positions)
Maybe a small amount. Entry level white collar jobs have a low hiring rate for other reasons, imho.
3. Thousands of layoffs (mostly attributed to AI use, while not 100%, the Anthropic's specific marketing push has a huge influence on this - unlike OAI and other labs)
What they say and what the actual reasons are not the same, imho. Correcting for over hiring is the actual main reason.
4. All low-code products/startups
Low-code and no-code products in the hands of someone who doesn’t have a developer’s mind and/or experience usually ends up as a mess, and quickly becomes an unusable mess.
I know of exactly two people who have done successfully used AI to make a low-code/no-code product. One is just highly motivated and wicked smart. The other did a minor in CS a long time ago (works in a different field). Everyone else shows me a pile of garbage and asks me how to fix it (answer: throw it away and start from scratch).
5. Web agencies who did small websites for local businesses
As with 4 above, the only site a local business can make for themselves is one that functions as a business card… at best. Usually it looks more like a business card that a kindergartner made. They simply don’t understand what makes a website good for their business, therefore they cannot direct AI to make it for them.
There’s a lot to criticize about AI, imho, but these aren’t on the list.
I personally know several digital marketing people who were "tech savvy" but had no programming experience who have launched websites that would have cost them thousands of dollars to build.
So much of what you'd previously pay a "real" freelance developer or web "agency" to build is no less "garbage" than what engineers would call the average vibe-coded web app.
Claude in particular is today really surprisingly good at taking examples and a layperson's description of a website and building something that looks good and is functional.
For obvious reasons, I think many developers/engineers don't want to accept this. They'd prefer to believe that there's something special about their craft that means something produced by AI isn't good enough. But the honest will acknowledge that spaghetti code and crap pre-dated AI.
> They'd prefer to believe that there's something special about their craft that means something produced by AI isn't good enough.
I know I can code and get better results than most people can with an LLM but I've came to realize that it doesn't matter and people just want to see results (even if they are kind of wrong).
In other words, with the website example, I've realized that even if the agency can do something 10x better, most people will choose to "buy" the AI website just because it's free or super cheap, and that makes me sad
Fair, of course price is a factor in whether one product is better than another, and yes it’s my opinion that things becoming more affordable/junkier, is not always a net increase in quality of life.
its destroyed my codebases with ai slop , errors, and code maintenance nightmares going forward. i feel bad for anyone having to work on ai generated code.
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.
No such thing as good or bad guys in business, only good or bad action. If you NitpickLawyer has a business, I'm sure there will be people calling for your head, no matter what your intentions are. The bigger the customer base the more "evil" you'd become. Everyone have their own interest which often conflict.
They didn’t even take the position that it was unethical to participate in surveillance and kill chains, just that the tech isn’t ready yet so it’s irresponsible to use it that way.
The position they took sounds much more politically feasible than the one you suggest they should've taken, at a time when the White House was threatening them with the Defense Production Act.
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.
Come on, Anthropic ARE the good guys if there are any. Certainly the incentives of trillions will do what money does, but they have assembled an incredibly altruistic and philosophically-minded crew. I’m rooting for them and trying real hard not to get cynical.
I thought "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product" is the most accepted wisdom on HN? At least when it comes to services from FB or Google. But if that comes from China they are the "good guys"?
Well, no, they're doing it to hose the US labs. But their releases have the effect of empowering individual users, which is a good bellwether of good-versus-evil in my book.
We can only blame ourselves for everything that happens as a result. For instance, the effect of US government sanctions on high-performance GPUs has been to force Chinese researchers to do more with less. It will be years before they can bring their own fabs up to speed, but they now understand that a Manhattan Project level of effort is called for, and their AI labs aren't going to drag their feet in the meantime. This is how we ended up with a 27B model that can run with the big dogs from only one generation ago.
I hope they keep releasing weights, but don't know how optimistic to be about that.
Their statement on this issue opened by emphasizing how eager they are to help kill people:
>I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.
There is no universe where this can be described as anything close to ethical.
It's not controversial to say that democracy is a more ethical form of government than autocracy. It's also not controversial to say that violence is sometimes justified when it's in self-defence or to prevent a greater injustice from happening. So what's the ethical objection to that statement?
You gave two statements which are different from what I quoted.
The idea of "defend[ing] the United States and other democracies" and "defeat[ing] our autocratic adversaries" are always the stated reasons for US military action. Iraq was certainly an "autocratic adversary" and hundreds of thousands of people died from the war there. Vietnam was about "defending democracies" and resulted in millions of people dying. These are atrocities on an incomprehensible scale.
The ethical objection is very simple. War is evil, and the military is in the business of war.
I wonder if GP subscribes to the narrative of moral equivalence between things the Iranian regime does (such as slaughtering crowds of anti-government protestors) and what Hamas does (such as the butchery and terror committed against innocent civilians on Oct 7th) and any deaths or injuries that occur directly attributable to a US military action. If so, then I suppose they'd say it's fair to condemn the US as evil because deaths have happened, after all. Pacifism and turning a blind eye to anything happening in another sovereign country seems like what that particular worldview advocates. Iran isn't pacifist, but would definitely like it if their geopolitical rivals would adopt pacifism.
"ethical" is not a word that carries the connotation of a universally agreed upon set of behaviors. Different peoples, groups, and cultures vary in what they consider acceptable behavior.
Anthropic played a really well orchestrated marketing gimmick so that they would be in the headlines for a couple days bringing awareness to non-tech people on how they are supposedly the good guys. They then backpedaled all of this and are in contract with the DoD once the headlines passed.
But this obviously worked as you now believe they are the good guys
...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.
Imagine being gullible enough to think any of those companies would ever chose AI safety over losing their monopolies in AI.
AI safety is important. My point is: you should have zero trust in those companies to actually care about AI Safety besides the marketing and PR aspect of it. Incentives matter.
Dunno, Anthropic delayed Mythos and refused to break their red lines for the DoW. But you seem to harbor this irrational hatred for them and the AI safety crowd so I'm not sure this discussion has much value.
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
I still put my pants on the same way, eat the same food, talk to my friends and family the same way. I drive to the grocery store, pick out the same food and cook food at the same home. Talk to my kids, take them to activities and watch Bluey.
The only time my reality has changed is when I spend time at a computer or on my phone and even then, its a fraction of the total time. So no, it's not a "totally different reality" for me.
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.
The auto labeling work (which has been partially described/presented at Tesla AI day events) seems more like engineering than research, a grab bag of techniques that I would guess the whole team must have contributed to. For example, they auto label low resolution/indeterminate objects (image segments) by temporal continuity... Something that is a low-res blob in the distance becomes a hi-res and easy to identify object when you drive by it, so by tracking objects backwards across frames you can learn how to more confidently label the lo-res blob. Things like this are useful, but it's the sort of stuff that engineers and developers are coming up with every day.
You don't think that tracking objects from frame to frame is obvious ?!
I can guarantee you this was built-in from day #1
I'm guessing you're not a developer if you don't then automatically think of end cases like "what if car # 1 isn't in the preceding frame" ... (then you look at some relevant test data and see it was there, unlabelled ...)
Tesla still hasn't achieved their 2016 self-drive goal by their self imposed deadline of 2017, even now a decade later. So, politely, is that accolade merited?
The current vehicles sure seem to come close. I'm not entirely clear on how they've missed this goal, but the current models can do full self driving where I live, including parking.
How does Elon's arbitrary deadlines impact whether the accolade is "merited"? Incredible progress was made in a fairly short amount of time. His accolade isn't based on his employer's ability to predict delivery dates, they're based on the quality of the systems that are actively deployed today.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Half right, half overstated. Thin LLM wrappers get eaten — products whose value-add is "we hand-tuned this prompt for X." Products that change workflow primitives (state, persistence across sessions, multi-step orchestration) are a different animal.
Karpathy pausing Eureka reads more like "I miss being at the frontier and can't replicate that as a solo founder" than "my moat got eaten." Different decision.
"that's the actual news", "the bigger signal", etc. -- this has a lot of the hallmarks of AI generated text but with overt stylistic simplification layered on top (nocaps, some weird spacing)
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.
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.
I have to imagine that Anthropic is giving him an equity grant worth $1B or more in their upcoming IPO. And having him will increase their market cap more than that, if for no other reason than that people trust him as a judge of who is winning the AI race. So it's already worth it even before he does any work.
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.
I think it happens on both ends of the spectrum, the folks you described, and also the ones with a good reputation and network who get recruited into new opportunities.
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.
I think both are true. Claude Code was one man's experimental project, but it's an application of AI, not AI itself.
Anthropic is a large company, with thousands of employees, and seems to be 100% (maybe 200%) LLM and scale pilled. All the advances from one model generation to the next are the result of dozens of experiments first at small scale then at larger scale, all competing for the same "development compute" portion of their overall "development + inference" compute resource.
In this environment, even if there are researchers who have ideas not on the "LLM + scale is all you need" path that Dario seems hell bent on, there seems to be not much chance that these ideas can compete for resources and compute with the mainstream experiments that the company believes their future depends on.
Maybe an individual developer like Sutskever, engaged purely in research rather than manning a barely turnable oil tanker, can make a difference, but at a company like Anthropic it seems way less likely. Cherny's baby is 100% aligned with Anthropic's mission of selling LLM tokens. Someone else fighting the mission, trying to pivot Anthropic in a new better direction is not likely to have such luck.
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.
It’s kind of useless to argue through metaphors here. There are a hundred researchers with more significant contributions to theory and practice than Karpathy. If you disagree, I’d love to see what papers or implementations you think he’s offered that pushed SOTA.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
> It is a pity we don't hear more about the truly brilliant researchers.
Reason? What is the value of that other than entertainment? And it's not in the interest of companies to make celebrities that then are poach targets (if they can avoid they would yes there are exceptions as noted elsewhere in this thread).
And if you did 'hear' (via articles) to what extent what was said even be correct vs. a writer just fluffing things up to the max.
Tech is not sports where you can actually see the superlatives and know that the person who praise is being lavished on actually won or threw or caught and so on. (Or even music where you can hear it and see the stadium that is packed with fans..)
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.
When OpenAI was founded, the mission was to develop AI, but nobody (anywhere) knew how to do AI, so OpenAI did ML research on games instead, which is what DeepMind was doing (with Google's perceived AI/ML dominance being the raison d'etre for OpenAI, and Google having just bought DeepMind). This was the era when Karpathy was at OpenAI.
Around the time Karpathy left, Ilya Sutskever, another OpenAI founder, started playing with Google's new "Transformer" architecture, which was the beginning of the "GPT" series, GPT-1, GPT-2 and eventually ChatGPT (GPT 3.5 + RLHF). In retrospect OpenAI's early Transformer experiments and GPT-1 was the inflection point that moved OpenAI from a company that wanted to build AI, as soon as anyone else did, to one that was actually doing so, although I think it would be revisionist for anyone to claim they knew what they were doing at the time. The early GPT-1 and GPT-2 papers read more like "wow, this is a bit unexpected, look at all of the things it can do!".
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.
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.
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.
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, ...
But to your point, then the growth is not in the ideas that can be generated with AI, and more in the structure. Which feels like a different stage. Maybe "growth", wasn't a good word.
Karpathy is so valuable as an educator to the whole world, and I wish he continue to communicate with us after joining Anthropic. Just concepts like "Software 2.0" and "Vibe Cording" are priceless!
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.
Anthropic looks a lot more like early Google -- not the first mover, but "lightning in a bottle" culture, talent, focus, and product direction that causes them to become a dominant, enduring figure.
OpenAI looks a lot more like early Yahoo -- earlier, quite a spectacle at first, definitely a game-changer and disruptor, but overspent, less focused, and subject to slow collapse under its own fragmentation and lack of overwhelming clarity of mission and purpose.
All that said, history rhymes but does not repeat, and trying to map present-day companies onto previous generations is an exercise in futility. The future is fundamentally unique.
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..
People say deepseek is about 5 months behind frontier, they claim their final training run was 7 figures. The trail blazing is likely making it cheaper to follow not more expensive.
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.”)
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.
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
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I will never get why anybody wants to work for FAGMAN. It's depressing how many talents put money above integrity.
You don't need to live in the bay area, most civilized places on earth let you live a comfortable life with a 10th of the salary, plus you are not selling your soul.
We are doing interesting R&D in other fields too, in places you would never believe.
For people like him who probably already have enough money it’s probably just chasing the opportunity to work at the bedding edge of the field he loves. And maybe get to be the father of 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.
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.
Tesla will crack it, I expect, just much later than Waymo. But Waymo cant optimise their own robots. I expect the cost and knowledge curve to rapidly go agaisnt Waymo eventually. Being able to build the robotaxis at scale is a huge advantage. Im no fan of Musk.
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
I can't help but feel like someone with Karpathy's experience and financial resources would start their own company if they had real creativity and vision.
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.
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).
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.
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.
You can’t build “working with amazing people”. At least not in a short amount of time. I bet that this was a significant part of the decision for Andrej.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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”
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.
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.
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
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.
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
Am I the only one who wasn’t particularly impressed by AutoResearch? If you looked at what the agent was actually doing, it was just tuning parameters mostly, not really trying different novel approaches.
I couldn’t help myself but consider this mostly a very inefficient variant of hyperparameter optimization, but someone correct me if I’m wrong, I may be looking at this too pessimistic.
I didn't dig into what the actual repository was doing, but personally, I took some inspiration from the idea after reading about it and realizing that I might have been underestimating the ability of LLMs. I put a bit more work into a performance harness I was using locally and just set some agents to brainstorming and they did seem to find some great stuff. So I don't really have a stance one way or another on this specific repo, but the general idea seems like a really good one.
Karpathy embedded within an organization is way more impressive than him out on his own with hot takes and little projects. I hope he does great things for Anthropic.
Absolutely, I wasn’t saying that him being at Anthropic wasn’t going to be effective, I just think his little projects wouldn’t be very interesting if his name wasn’t attached to them.
Inefficient variants with $100m+ worth of compute will still probably outperform the best team of researchers
I guess we must expect it at this point. But funny that has model written tokens like ’ instead of '
More like he'll blog and tweet about using Claude and get gullible software engineers to buy Claude subscriptions and work on their own obsolescence while paying for it.
Many people are still deluded and think he is the same person who wrote the informal AI tutorials in plain html. He isn't, he is selling stuff now.
I'm as jaded as can be but I think Anthropic is now beyond the point where they'd place much value on farming Karpathy's name recognition. I'm sure they considered it an extra plus in his hiring package but they wouldn't do the level of comp package he'd want if they didn't believe the odds were decent that he'll contribute serious value.
Sure, it can always not work out but that's no more a risk with him than any high-profile hire who doesn't really need the money and will always have other options.
What is he selling? How is this time different compared to when he was at OpenAI or at Tesla? You could say he was shilling those products too. I don't see any shift. He's still posted free in depth YouTube videos recently.
> What is he selling?
Is that a serious question? He already promoted vibe coding and AI hype. Now he is literally there to promote Anthropic and its IPO price.
When he was at OpenAI it wasn't overtly commercial yet. At Tesla he had a way lower profile. Now he is the vibe coding Jesus for deluded software engineers. The impact is much larger.
> At Tesla he had a way lower profile.
?
He was literally rolled out in front of camera as Tesla's AI prodigy at multiple streamed events designed to appeal to techy consumers and dev recruitment. He's definitely been one of AI's public personas for a long time now, and his employers have regularly aided/directed/utilized him accordingly.
I think he's just genuinely excited about the capabilities.
(I do understand that for Anthropic it's a brand boost as well, just like signing other prominent researchers, as it was with LeCun and Meta etc).
This is good branding move for Anthropic. Karpathy is well respected among ML crowd.
Speaking of, how did he not lose credibility at “full self driving next year, better buy it now”-Tesla?
It might be Elon who went and said that and said they don’t need lidar, but as director of AI and auto vision Karpathy bears the responsibility for those features.
>Speaking of, how did he not lose credibility at “full self driving next year, better buy it now”-Tesla?
That I also want to know. He bailed out of Tesla right when the limitations of his "LIDAR-less cameras only self driving" system were becoming obvious, and nobody asked him about the hindsight of this obvious fuckup.
>but as director of AI and auto vision Karpathy bears the responsibility for those features.
Exactly. You lead the R&D, so it's on you. If your boss makes stupid decisions in public overriding your best judgement, the leave and go somewhere where your decisions be respected. The ML market was red hot for people like him back then so it's not like he didn't have alternatives.
Although I doubt Elon forced that idea on him, since he's the one who was confidently claiming that vision only is better since Lidar pollutes the sensor fusion data.
Guess his boyish looks and his videos educating outsiders and students about AI contributed..
Elon makes it so easy to hate him as much as to admire. No comparison.
With a cursory glance at Tesla's hardware the rest of the self driving car industry quickly surmised that it was at the time nowhere near sufficient to to deliver L4 autonomy, and that's before sensor modalities entered the equation. Karpathy was either BSing for money, or he actually believed the hype. Either way it was a bad look.
Minor celebrity fwiw - deserved though.
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!
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
I wonder if he had to answer a few Leetcode / Codility problems first.
The warm up rounds to filter out the fluffy includes asking what is a Matrix, do this calculation, what is a LLM. 2nd round include stuff like explain the binary search algorithm, write a double linked list in C, and a take home project.
Would have been great to hear that his inability to do the interview memorization bullshit as a senior was why he didn't get hired somewhere like OpenAI. lol.
Except the good companies probably dont make you do silly stupid outdated interview practices without the tools you can actually use on the job today, right?
Karpathy is a co-founder of OpenAI.
I'm not sure what's your point since he is the co-founder of OpenAI
lmfao leetcode
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!
> 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.
There's a choice to be made between helpfully defeating someone's ATS and searching for more clueful employers. I'll probably be walking paper resumes into local offices next time around anyhow.
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.
He is a great educator, not only for ML. He taught speedcubing under the badmefisto pseudonym.
Oh my god, my two worlds just had an insane collision.
I learned speed cubing from badmefisto when I was in middle school, ~16yr ago (today my ao100 is ~15s).
I never knew it was Karpathy. What an insane knowledge drop. Thanks for sharing!
i still probably have my paper print outs of OLL/PLL pdfs somewhere...
Guess these prodigys have brains that are cross functional. Like Magnus Carlsen predicting premier league.
“Master Control Program’s been snapping up all us programs who believe. If he thinks you’re useful, he takes over all your functions so he gets bigger.”
— Ram, Tron (1982)
Alternative to archive.ph
Works where archive.ph is blocked, no CAPTCHA, no Javascript, no DDoS directed at blogger
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA23AbWR...
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.
Yes. I think Anthropic's success with claude code + cowork and the way it's shredding through white-collar work is basically cementing the thesis of Geoffrey Hinton's latest paper (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s12559-026-105...). I highly recommend reading it in full, but briefly:
1. Copernican Revolution -> We aren't the center of the universe
2. The Darwinian Revolution -> We aren't the pinnacle of life
3. The Freudian Revolution -> We aren't even in control of our own minds
4. The "Intuitive AI" Revolution -> We aren't the only form of intelligence
I think even a month ago I would've read this article and scoffed, but having used Claude Code almost exclusively at work for the last couple months it seems pretty undeniable that in-context-learning and a good enough harness is all you need to displace most "thinking" jobs that require just a bachelors. The hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into data center build-out basically hinges on this thesis, and frankly I trust the judgements of the billionaires financing these deals better than LLM-naysayers on hackernews (not to mention the non-public info they have access to). You don't need to reach superintelligence to still deeply, deeply affect society, and I think Anthropic was the first to build products that are actually good enough and, critically, hands-off enough to do just this. Every day it's clearer and clearer to me that "I was born into a poor family but am relatively intelligent and good at learning things, therefore I can find success" is exactly what will ultimately be eliminated as the outcome of this unless we get the government to step in and regulate.
I could go on and on, but the main point I'm trying to make is that you should definitely examine unease you feel about Anthropic, consider framing that unease in the context of Hinton's argument, and ask yourself what the implications may be.
Not really. I mean it’s not like they are particularly far ahead. Maybe a small lead on model performance, but nothing particularly significant. All the major players are within 6 months of each other. As soon as model improvements plateau there will be no observable difference between providers.
Name three things they destroyed?
1. Figma (in progress)
2. Most entry level jobs for current graduates in white collar fields. (See hiring rates for these positions)
3. Thousands of layoffs (mostly attributed to AI use, while not 100%, the Anthropic's specific marketing push has a huge influence on this - unlike OAI and other labs)
4. All low-code products/startups
5. Web agencies who did small websites for local businesses
While AI industry push is there for all of the above, Anthropic's specific marketing/PR is specifically directed towards forced adoption of AI and burning tokens, unlike from other labs.
> 1. Figma (in progress)
Hmmm… maybe. I think not. It really depends on your other claims below, with which I mostly disagree.
2. Most entry level jobs for current graduates in white collar fields. (See hiring rates for these positions)
Maybe a small amount. Entry level white collar jobs have a low hiring rate for other reasons, imho.
3. Thousands of layoffs (mostly attributed to AI use, while not 100%, the Anthropic's specific marketing push has a huge influence on this - unlike OAI and other labs)
What they say and what the actual reasons are not the same, imho. Correcting for over hiring is the actual main reason.
4. All low-code products/startups
Low-code and no-code products in the hands of someone who doesn’t have a developer’s mind and/or experience usually ends up as a mess, and quickly becomes an unusable mess.
I know of exactly two people who have done successfully used AI to make a low-code/no-code product. One is just highly motivated and wicked smart. The other did a minor in CS a long time ago (works in a different field). Everyone else shows me a pile of garbage and asks me how to fix it (answer: throw it away and start from scratch).
5. Web agencies who did small websites for local businesses
As with 4 above, the only site a local business can make for themselves is one that functions as a business card… at best. Usually it looks more like a business card that a kindergartner made. They simply don’t understand what makes a website good for their business, therefore they cannot direct AI to make it for them.
There’s a lot to criticize about AI, imho, but these aren’t on the list.
I personally know several digital marketing people who were "tech savvy" but had no programming experience who have launched websites that would have cost them thousands of dollars to build.
So much of what you'd previously pay a "real" freelance developer or web "agency" to build is no less "garbage" than what engineers would call the average vibe-coded web app.
Claude in particular is today really surprisingly good at taking examples and a layperson's description of a website and building something that looks good and is functional.
For obvious reasons, I think many developers/engineers don't want to accept this. They'd prefer to believe that there's something special about their craft that means something produced by AI isn't good enough. But the honest will acknowledge that spaghetti code and crap pre-dated AI.
> They'd prefer to believe that there's something special about their craft that means something produced by AI isn't good enough.
I know I can code and get better results than most people can with an LLM but I've came to realize that it doesn't matter and people just want to see results (even if they are kind of wrong).
In other words, with the website example, I've realized that even if the agency can do something 10x better, most people will choose to "buy" the AI website just because it's free or super cheap, and that makes me sad
These seems to be healthy desctructions, if the market rejects them eventually for a better product
But it’s not a better product, it’s just cheaper.
That’s one person’s opinion, yours, and not the market’s.
Fair, of course price is a factor in whether one product is better than another, and yes it’s my opinion that things becoming more affordable/junkier, is not always a net increase in quality of life.
This is not destroying. This is success.
> This is success
For who?
I was to talking to a YC founder, his biggest fear is waking up to a new Claude launch making his startup obsolete the next morning.
Similar sentiment shared with other startup founders- check on x about all VCs talking about moats against big labs.
A girl school in Iran (potentially, together with Maven/Palantir).
1-3) my free time (too busy using Claude Code)
Do school girls count?
Only if they're Western...
Not yet, but soon… Bun
Karpathy's reputation, it appears.
Without Karpathy, the AI field hasn't skipped a beat, but he is certainly a great addition to any team.
its destroyed my codebases with ai slop , errors, and code maintenance nightmares going forward. i feel bad for anyone having to work on ai generated code.
This sounds like something that could have easily been avoided.
Karpathy is talented and to me he always seemed like someone who would be against building something like skynet. Anthropic is lucky to have him.
Honestly, if Skynet were possible, Anthropic would probably build it first and claim they had to because OpenAI is bad.
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.
No such thing as good or bad guys in business, only good or bad action. If you NitpickLawyer has a business, I'm sure there will be people calling for your head, no matter what your intentions are. The bigger the customer base the more "evil" you'd become. Everyone have their own interest which often conflict.
Totally. They are the only ones who said no to letting their tech being used for illegal use cases.
This doesn't automatically make them the great virtuous team. It just means the rest of the pack are toxic as all hell.
They didn’t even take the position that it was unethical to participate in surveillance and kill chains, just that the tech isn’t ready yet so it’s irresponsible to use it that way.
The position they took sounds much more politically feasible than the one you suggest they should've taken, at a time when the White House was threatening them with the Defense Production Act.
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.
Come on, Anthropic ARE the good guys if there are any. Certainly the incentives of trillions will do what money does, but they have assembled an incredibly altruistic and philosophically-minded crew. I’m rooting for them and trying real hard not to get cynical.
It's like the Mike prince arc in the show billions
yeah but i don't think there's any large org which is 'good guys'.
There are several. They're in China, releasing competitive open-weight models on a regular basis.
I thought "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product" is the most accepted wisdom on HN? At least when it comes to services from FB or Google. But if that comes from China they are the "good guys"?
Good luck "productizing" a model running on the GPU in my basement with no Internet access. I wouldn't use them via a cloud provider, though.
Ah yes, the famous altruistic China, no profit or geopolitical/national security motives, doing it all purely for the love of the game.
Well, no, they're doing it to hose the US labs. But their releases have the effect of empowering individual users, which is a good bellwether of good-versus-evil in my book.
We can only blame ourselves for everything that happens as a result. For instance, the effect of US government sanctions on high-performance GPUs has been to force Chinese researchers to do more with less. It will be years before they can bring their own fabs up to speed, but they now understand that a Manhattan Project level of effort is called for, and their AI labs aren't going to drag their feet in the meantime. This is how we ended up with a 27B model that can run with the big dogs from only one generation ago.
I hope they keep releasing weights, but don't know how optimistic to be about that.
So... do you see a problem with regulating skynet to not kill us all?
Anthropic has drawn lines with the most powerful organization in the world, that OpenAI capitulated on within hours for a small contract.
Their statement on this issue opened by emphasizing how eager they are to help kill people:
>I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.
There is no universe where this can be described as anything close to ethical.
It's not controversial to say that democracy is a more ethical form of government than autocracy. It's also not controversial to say that violence is sometimes justified when it's in self-defence or to prevent a greater injustice from happening. So what's the ethical objection to that statement?
You gave two statements which are different from what I quoted.
The idea of "defend[ing] the United States and other democracies" and "defeat[ing] our autocratic adversaries" are always the stated reasons for US military action. Iraq was certainly an "autocratic adversary" and hundreds of thousands of people died from the war there. Vietnam was about "defending democracies" and resulted in millions of people dying. These are atrocities on an incomprehensible scale.
The ethical objection is very simple. War is evil, and the military is in the business of war.
I wonder if GP subscribes to the narrative of moral equivalence between things the Iranian regime does (such as slaughtering crowds of anti-government protestors) and what Hamas does (such as the butchery and terror committed against innocent civilians on Oct 7th) and any deaths or injuries that occur directly attributable to a US military action. If so, then I suppose they'd say it's fair to condemn the US as evil because deaths have happened, after all. Pacifism and turning a blind eye to anything happening in another sovereign country seems like what that particular worldview advocates. Iran isn't pacifist, but would definitely like it if their geopolitical rivals would adopt pacifism.
It's frankly controversial to consider the US the arbiter of supposed democracy.
Especially given the context of these press releases was right at the height of "we'll have Greenland one way or another" pronouncements.
Anthropic showed their belly same as OpenAI anyways.
"ethical" is not a word that carries the connotation of a universally agreed upon set of behaviors. Different peoples, groups, and cultures vary in what they consider acceptable behavior.
Let me rephrase this.
Anthropic played a really well orchestrated marketing gimmick so that they would be in the headlines for a couple days bringing awareness to non-tech people on how they are supposedly the good guys. They then backpedaled all of this and are in contract with the DoD once the headlines passed.
But this obviously worked as you now believe they are the good guys
They didn't backpedal at all, you're spreading FUD.
Their red lines are still in place. They are the only AI company with those red lines.
Ah yes, right
[1] https://www.obsolete.pub/p/exclusive-anthropic-is-quietly-ba... [2] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/25/tech/anthropic-safety-pol... [3] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-dials-back-ai-safety-c...
Those sources don’t claim Anthropic is crossing its red lines (AI-controlled weapons and mass domestic surveillance of American citizens).
You didn't read your own sources. The red lines are still in place.
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-...
Exactly.
This good guy ("AI Safety") versus bad guy is all marketing gimmicks. I'm old enough that it reminds me of Google "don't be evil".
What I find worse is that some people actually believe Anthropic are really the good guys.
You should chat with some people involved in AI safety, if you really think it's a farce.
Imagine being gullible enough to think any of those companies would ever chose AI safety over losing their monopolies in AI.
AI safety is important. My point is: you should have zero trust in those companies to actually care about AI Safety besides the marketing and PR aspect of it. Incentives matter.
Dunno, Anthropic delayed Mythos and refused to break their red lines for the DoW. But you seem to harbor this irrational hatred for them and the AI safety crowd so I'm not sure this discussion has much value.
There's a wide variety of seriousness https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIg4zQKBpAs
Skynet is being built on the Ukrainian/Russian front lines.
And it is sad some people are thinking Karpathy or Karp are persons of any benevolence.
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
I still put my pants on the same way, eat the same food, talk to my friends and family the same way. I drive to the grocery store, pick out the same food and cook food at the same home. Talk to my kids, take them to activities and watch Bluey.
The only time my reality has changed is when I spend time at a computer or on my phone and even then, its a fraction of the total time. So no, it's not a "totally different reality" for me.
Have you considered that maybe the experts in a field are actually correct about that field?
have you considered that at any second all our existing knowledge could be rendered redundant on the frontier these experts work in?
Kinda funny that you are asking "how does one judge someone?" while apparently not understanding how to judge someone.
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.
The auto labeling work (which has been partially described/presented at Tesla AI day events) seems more like engineering than research, a grab bag of techniques that I would guess the whole team must have contributed to. For example, they auto label low resolution/indeterminate objects (image segments) by temporal continuity... Something that is a low-res blob in the distance becomes a hi-res and easy to identify object when you drive by it, so by tracking objects backwards across frames you can learn how to more confidently label the lo-res blob. Things like this are useful, but it's the sort of stuff that engineers and developers are coming up with every day.
Not back in 2016.
You don't think that tracking objects from frame to frame is obvious ?!
I can guarantee you this was built-in from day #1
I'm guessing you're not a developer if you don't then automatically think of end cases like "what if car # 1 isn't in the preceding frame" ... (then you look at some relevant test data and see it was there, unlabelled ...)
Karpathy is also badmephisto, a name you might have heard of if you're into cubing.
http://badmephisto.com/
Tesla still hasn't achieved their 2016 self-drive goal by their self imposed deadline of 2017, even now a decade later. So, politely, is that accolade merited?
The current vehicles sure seem to come close. I'm not entirely clear on how they've missed this goal, but the current models can do full self driving where I live, including parking.
How does Elon's arbitrary deadlines impact whether the accolade is "merited"? Incredible progress was made in a fairly short amount of time. His accolade isn't based on his employer's ability to predict delivery dates, they're based on the quality of the systems that are actively deployed today.
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/
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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...
Get him audited.
Half right, half overstated. Thin LLM wrappers get eaten — products whose value-add is "we hand-tuned this prompt for X." Products that change workflow primitives (state, persistence across sessions, multi-step orchestration) are a different animal.
Karpathy pausing Eureka reads more like "I miss being at the frontier and can't replicate that as a solo founder" than "my moat got eaten." Different decision.
"that's the actual news", "the bigger signal", etc. -- this has a lot of the hallmarks of AI generated text but with overt stylistic simplification layered on top (nocaps, some weird spacing)
I mean, who hasn't put "stop using emdashes" into their prompt yet?
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.
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.
I’m seeing founders being encouraged to run their business with AI and cut out the etc etc
Sure, that’s capitals’ dream but how does that actually work out in practice
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.
Make a lot of money.
Access to a million GPUs?
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.
I am not entirely sure you understand how expensive it is to train these models
Sir, please make it easy to break the twitter/x moat. Why don't we have an app that just posts to all the socials like bluesky/mastodon/threads etc
Money ppl are on x, hence founders, hence the rest.
might want to check https://github.com/alexandru/social-publish
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.
yes, pure engagement farmer. Marketing yourself is a big part of the biz these days. Thanks, social media
rest & vest if he makes it to IPO
I wonder what's his net worth - probably 100M+?
I have to imagine that Anthropic is giving him an equity grant worth $1B or more in their upcoming IPO. And having him will increase their market cap more than that, if for no other reason than that people trust him as a judge of who is winning the AI race. So it's already worth it even before he does any work.
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.
He’s a founder of OpenAI —- likely a billionaire if he held on to his share
It's still quite interesting to me how a founder of a nonprofit can become a billionaire by having shares in it.
Because they later founded a for-profit to raise the capital required in the AI talent and compute race.
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.
And in the case where a team gets overworked, there are legions more fresh and bright engineers to burn.
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.
It's incredibly hard to do good, novel work in 2 years for engineering. You'll likely not learn much either.
> And 2 years is probably pretty average for the whole tech industry.
Yes, and it is a problem
> maybe for a fungible CRUD engineer
And there's the cause.
We're in a meat grinder, and there is no $100M payout in sight for most of us
I mean just because OP wanted to "ignore" that he was at Tesla for 5 years, he was... still at Tesla for 5 years.
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.
London has not been part of Europe for a decade now. They locked themselves out in a bout of insanity
Europe and the European Union are not the same thing. The UK is definitely European.
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.
London is economically, politically, geographically, and culturally fairly distinct from continental Europe.
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.
-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
I think it happens on both ends of the spectrum, the folks you described, and also the ones with a good reputation and network who get recruited into new opportunities.
Interesting methodology
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.
I think both are true. Claude Code was one man's experimental project, but it's an application of AI, not AI itself.
Anthropic is a large company, with thousands of employees, and seems to be 100% (maybe 200%) LLM and scale pilled. All the advances from one model generation to the next are the result of dozens of experiments first at small scale then at larger scale, all competing for the same "development compute" portion of their overall "development + inference" compute resource.
In this environment, even if there are researchers who have ideas not on the "LLM + scale is all you need" path that Dario seems hell bent on, there seems to be not much chance that these ideas can compete for resources and compute with the mainstream experiments that the company believes their future depends on.
Maybe an individual developer like Sutskever, engaged purely in research rather than manning a barely turnable oil tanker, can make a difference, but at a company like Anthropic it seems way less likely. Cherny's baby is 100% aligned with Anthropic's mission of selling LLM tokens. Someone else fighting the mission, trying to pivot Anthropic in a new better direction is not likely to have such luck.
I was unaware that one persons idea invented LLMs and their coding abilities.
I strong suggest you better learn your recent history —- and how generally these things work
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.
Just because something is not ground breaking that doesn't mean that technology path isn't valuable.
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.
Agree. Watch people glaze him tho. Same as John Carmack who is supposedly brilliant but hasn't actually really done anything since Doom.
> 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’s not a hands-in researcher just like lebron is not a basketball player but media personality :)
It’s kind of useless to argue through metaphors here. There are a hundred researchers with more significant contributions to theory and practice than Karpathy. If you disagree, I’d love to see what papers or implementations you think he’s offered that pushed SOTA.
Lebron can still dunk when he needs to!
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.
CEOs also get paid millions and billions to do nothing. Sooooo...
"Improve yourself, no mistakes" in a loop. Woooah sooo revolutionary...
> 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.
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
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.
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, ...
> It is a pity we don't hear more about the truly brilliant researchers.
Reason? What is the value of that other than entertainment? And it's not in the interest of companies to make celebrities that then are poach targets (if they can avoid they would yes there are exceptions as noted elsewhere in this thread).
And if you did 'hear' (via articles) to what extent what was said even be correct vs. a writer just fluffing things up to the max.
Tech is not sports where you can actually see the superlatives and know that the person who praise is being lavished on actually won or threw or caught and so on. (Or even music where you can hear it and see the stadium that is packed with fans..)
he'd probably be a great face for developer relations or whatever Antropic calls the role
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.
Who surpassed Tesla that doesn't operate in some very limited region?
Waymo 70k driverless rides a day.
Apollo Go 100k driverless rides a day.
Tesla 0-5? driverless rides a day.
It's a bit of an exaggeration to call Waymo "driverless". All of their cars are supervised.
Yes, no driver needed at all. Your Tesla makes money for you while you sleep at home.
> 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?
When OpenAI was founded, the mission was to develop AI, but nobody (anywhere) knew how to do AI, so OpenAI did ML research on games instead, which is what DeepMind was doing (with Google's perceived AI/ML dominance being the raison d'etre for OpenAI, and Google having just bought DeepMind). This was the era when Karpathy was at OpenAI.
Around the time Karpathy left, Ilya Sutskever, another OpenAI founder, started playing with Google's new "Transformer" architecture, which was the beginning of the "GPT" series, GPT-1, GPT-2 and eventually ChatGPT (GPT 3.5 + RLHF). In retrospect OpenAI's early Transformer experiments and GPT-1 was the inflection point that moved OpenAI from a company that wanted to build AI, as soon as anyone else did, to one that was actually doing so, although I think it would be revisionist for anyone to claim they knew what they were doing at the time. The early GPT-1 and GPT-2 papers read more like "wow, this is a bit unexpected, look at all of the things it can do!".
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.
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).
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.
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.
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>
That’s not my claim.
My point is that product velocity is visible in shipped workflow improvements, not prestige hires
Prestige is fickle, look at academia today
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.
The USA does too, but it seems all we can talk about in America is how workers are "obsolete".
Anyways, what do you think the solution is to that?
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
Anthropic as well. The private equity partnerships for guaranteed users are going to make their numbers look great.
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
This is true for all the UASanian frontier model owners
They are all going to get their lunch eaten by the Chinese.
In the USA with access to most of the world's capital, they've succumbed to the temptation of "bigger, faster, harder"
Whilst the Chinese, with enough capital only, have had to think.
The Chinese models are already miles ahead on cost/inference basis and will probably pass all the USAnian companies in five years
The age of UASnian engineering dominance are coming to an end.
Let's all hope she goes quietly - not at the moment
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.
The privilege stuff feel zero sum?
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.
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, ...
Yes, that makes sense.
But to your point, then the growth is not in the ideas that can be generated with AI, and more in the structure. Which feels like a different stage. Maybe "growth", wasn't a good word.
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.
I would guess he's never left out at whats happening, because he's still highly connected with those people even when not at the company.
I also feel like there are many ways he can access compute for use of his own ideas.
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?
Karpathy is so valuable as an educator to the whole world, and I wish he continue to communicate with us after joining Anthropic. Just concepts like "Software 2.0" and "Vibe Cording" are priceless!
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.
Anthropic looks a lot more like early Google -- not the first mover, but "lightning in a bottle" culture, talent, focus, and product direction that causes them to become a dominant, enduring figure.
OpenAI looks a lot more like early Yahoo -- earlier, quite a spectacle at first, definitely a game-changer and disruptor, but overspent, less focused, and subject to slow collapse under its own fragmentation and lack of overwhelming clarity of mission and purpose.
All that said, history rhymes but does not repeat, and trying to map present-day companies onto previous generations is an exercise in futility. The future is fundamentally unique.
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..
People say deepseek is about 5 months behind frontier, they claim their final training run was 7 figures. The trail blazing is likely making it cheaper to follow not more expensive.
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.
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?
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
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 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?
If anything, sounds like Karpathy wanted a whole datacentre, and now he's got one...
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.
Truly makes me positive about the future. Thanks Andrej
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.
Looks like they sprinkled their ipo money on him.
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?
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.
I'm trying to think of a standard this doesn't apply to
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
damn hipsters.
LLM is not comparable to MCP or skills. There's no way I could've come up with LLMs on my own. Anyway Claude Code is the best.
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.
I have this image in mind [1] - I wonder how it shifted over time.
[1] https://imgur.com/a/3zBZ27I
To be fair, MCP and Skills do not have any source code. It is fundamentally impossible to release either standard without making it open.
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.
Gemini is insanely bad. It even takes super long to start up, why??
It's probably parsing the contents of the entirety of https://killedbygoogle.com/ when it starts up
I've never heard of any of those other harnesses
Tim Abbott the Zulip guy.
Having crappy limits, lots of down times, 4.7opus isn't all that.
Who cares mate?
This is an extremely valid opinion.
What's your guess, how much stock / cash he got?
(I also assume they gave him a ton of independence in R&D)
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.
I will never get why anybody wants to work for FAGMAN. It's depressing how many talents put money above integrity.
You don't need to live in the bay area, most civilized places on earth let you live a comfortable life with a 10th of the salary, plus you are not selling your soul.
We are doing interesting R&D in other fields too, in places you would never believe.
For people like him who probably already have enough money it’s probably just chasing the opportunity to work at the bedding edge of the field he loves. And maybe get to be the father of AGI.
I get having the opportunity to do research, the problem is for whom.
Do you really want to be the person that hands this kind of tech to corporates? Or that does anything to benefit those corporates?
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.
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.
Interesting if his educational startup turned out to be less perspective at least with the current gen of llms.
Anyone have any stats on just what the headcount is at Anthropic and OpenAI these days?
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.
Tesla will crack it, I expect, just much later than Waymo. But Waymo cant optimise their own robots. I expect the cost and knowledge curve to rapidly go agaisnt Waymo eventually. Being able to build the robotaxis at scale is a huge advantage. Im no fan of Musk.
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
Sudevo7x
Sudev ray
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 :-)
Great person and great company
I hope he still gets to do some educative stuff on the side too
I can't help but feel like someone with Karpathy's experience and financial resources would start their own company if they had real creativity and vision.
Way too late.
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.
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.
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".
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).
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
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.
Bravo Andrej
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.
The 2010s founders, how much are they worth?
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.
You can’t build “working with amazing people”. At least not in a short amount of time. I bet that this was a significant part of the decision for Andrej.
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.
Meta: Why 1000 votes?
1000 people think it’s a cool story. (I am one of them). I like Karpathy and I like Anthropic and I’m excited to see them together.
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
I would like to announce I've retired. The tech industries are screwed and the future is paper.
This is good he is best of best
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.
Why is this title not editorialized like others when it's ambiguous?
It feels like every single tweet he makes is a hit
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.
> 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."
I think this signals game over in the arms race.
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.
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...
Well at least he knows what not to do now.
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.
Smart move
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.
And now, a message from an actual deck chair on the Titanic
Does this count as news now on HN?
Guys ...
Skynet is winning.
My personal update: just quit playing modded Minecraft. Thinking of downloading Apex Legends. What is everyone doing?
whatever happened at Eureka labs?
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.
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
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"
Thanks for introducing me to xcancel
didnt he foreshadow this in a recent interview? lmao
This just in: AI Superstar tweets about new stint. Crowd goes wild. News at eleven.
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.