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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
> Its a bit concerning when someone supposedly intelligent still speaks somewhat highly of someone so clearly not.
Have you considered the possibility that someone you regard as extremely intelligent is speaking from real-life experience and direct proximity when they say another person is smart?
Or perhaps your bias toward Musk make that impossible to even consider.
Yes, the world absolutely needs more purity tests. Would you like to take the lead? Oh, and shaming. We should definitely be shaming more people because it has proven to be so productive.
Publicly disavowing Musk is going to be a bit difficult when his new employer just leased an entire datacentre from Elon Musk's SpaceX. Anthropic and Elon Musk seem to have quite warm feelings towards one another lately.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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...
"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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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...)
yes stop kidding yourself that he is going in as a tech leader in terms of providing technical innovation..at that stage its your persona that matters not the tech (sure I think Anthropic is going to listen to his advice..but its a transactional marketing win primarly)
his value to Anthropic is his influence..he has over 2 million followers, and value is that he is the Top influencer for AI right now, like it or not. just like Selena Gomez might be for top for women age 21-29...
Every AI nerd I know reposts his (very thoughtful posts and projects mind you) like religon
He may not be a brilliant researcher, but he is a brilliant teacher. I am glad he is joining Anthropic so he can stay up to date with the next round of things that he will teach :)
FWIW while Karpathy was at Tesla he was basically working on the vision component. The actual driving component (using vision as an input) was originally all C++. They may have started migrating parts of the driving component from C++ to neural networks while Karpathy was there, but most of it happened after he left in 2022, with the big switch being FSD 12 in 2024. User reports from before/after FSD 12 are like night and day.
Tesla self driving kind of works. In a very similar way to how it kind of worked back in 2016. It's better than it was in 2016, don't get me wrong. But even today they haven't solved the problem and Karpathy left in 2022. And other companies notably have actually surpassed Tesla over that time. I don't think anyone could reasonably say he walked away in 2022 because he thought the job was finished.
I somehow felt he, along with Andrew Ng, are very few well-known AI experts that are left behind on the money side during the AI-gets-me-super-rich crazy time, unfortunately.
I can't speak for Andrew Ng - but my take is he did out of pure altruism - love. just in terms of advancing free education e.g coursera & the free machine learning courses etc he brought to the masses.
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.
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
It feels like these companies are constantly going back and forth on who has the best product constantly. It's such a dynamic time with how fast they are both working.
Out here in the actual demonstrated world, OpenAI has been leaking quality people like a sieve, has not yet demonstrated anything remotely similar to 'taste', and is led by a sociopath (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may...), so I think you can rest easy.
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.
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, ...
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?
We are in the early stages of AI. Anthropic is Altavista and OpenAI is AskJeeves or something. 10-20 years from now the scene will be unrecognizable and all of this will be inconsequential but at the same time it is the fondation on which tomorrow is built.
Well, one big difference now is that you need to billions to become the next big player. The barriers to entry are incredibly high, if you plan on competing against the big players.
Of course, there could be some future lab or startup which completely revolutionizes the field by going for some approach that doesn't require a boatload of money to train a model, but for now, we're stuck with the LLMs and the costs they come with..
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 have been impressed by some of his work, especially on the vulgarisation and simplification. Excellent communicator and engineer. But I am a bit more skeptical about his taste and vision.
Leaving OpenAI to work for Elon Musk was a poor move, and AFAIK his work on CV at Tesla did not bring anything groundbreaking, unfortunately probably the opposite (the bet on camera-only driven system did not pay off) and his talks about the approach would indicate that his whole idea to make it work was nothing more than hill-climbing.
Also, his over-reaction to the whole Claw thing was a bit ridiculous, in my opinion.
I don't see him as a Scientist in the field, but more as an efficient tinkerer.
> the bet on camera-only driven system did not pay off
This is a pretty unsubstantiated claim. Tesla is now launching robotaxis at a fraction of the cost of Waymos, in part because they don't need all the Lidar.
But Tesla has been promising full self-driving "next year" for quite a long time now, and it seems they are stuck at the "95% there" stage basically forever.
i think his “fame” in the past few years has been creating teaching materials, projects, etc with lots of nuanced informative takes around the LLM space
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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
The honest reality that people actually like X and use it. They don't make it a point to show off their virtues by boycotting it. Nearly everyone important in the space uses it.
I don't care what their AI is used to generate, as I see that as the user's problem both legally and morally. But I'll be damned if any actions I take make Musk any wealthier, considering what he's doing with what he already has.
Nobody who isn't fully on board with white supremacy (et tu, Andrej?) should be using Twitter at this point.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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I guess we must expect it at this point. But funny that has model written tokens like ’ instead of '
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.
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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!
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!
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> Its a bit concerning when someone supposedly intelligent still speaks somewhat highly of someone so clearly not.
Have you considered the possibility that someone you regard as extremely intelligent is speaking from real-life experience and direct proximity when they say another person is smart?
Or perhaps your bias toward Musk make that impossible to even consider.
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Yes, the world absolutely needs more purity tests. Would you like to take the lead? Oh, and shaming. We should definitely be shaming more people because it has proven to be so productive.
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You can still respect the work of someone who is a complete pos. The same way you can criticize the bad work of a very nice person.
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Do you have examples of these points?
Publicly disavowing Musk is going to be a bit difficult when his new employer just leased an entire datacentre from Elon Musk's SpaceX. Anthropic and Elon Musk seem to have quite warm feelings towards one another lately.
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?
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.
“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)
Anyone else fearing Anthropic more and more each day? Not from a perspective that they are doing so well, but rather that it's like an industry tornado, sucking up and destroying everything in it's path.
Name three things they destroyed?
1. 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.
A girl school in Iran (potentially, together with Maven/Palantir).
Do school girls count?
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1-3) my free time (too busy using Claude Code)
Not yet, but soon… Bun
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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.
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Anthropic has drawn lines with the most powerful organization in the world, that OpenAI capitulated on within hours for a small contract.
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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.
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Skynet is being built on the Ukrainian/Russian front lines.
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?
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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.
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.
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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!
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
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...
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"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?
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.
Bravo Andrej
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
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
I am not entirely sure you understand how expensive it is to train these models
> 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.
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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.
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He moves around quite a bit. Less than 2 years on average if you take away the longest and shortest jobs. It feels like this is just a celebrity hire to help raise IPO value, and then he'll move again when the tech hits another real-world scaling wall. Expect another short stint (stunt) with Anthropic.
rest & vest if he makes it to IPO
I wonder what's his net worth - probably 100M+?
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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
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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.
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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
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Interesting methodology
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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.
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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...)
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> just becomes a glorified marketer
That implies Karpathy is either dumb or desperate and he is neither of those by a long shot.
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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:
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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, ...
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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.
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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.
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Yes, no driver needed at all. Your Tesla makes money for you while you sleep at home.
I somehow felt he, along with Andrew Ng, are very few well-known AI experts that are left behind on the money side during the AI-gets-me-super-rich crazy time, unfortunately.
Only if you think B is an important thing. He is easily > $100M from Tesla.
Andrew Ng has been investing in AI startups for almost a decade, I would be very surprised if this rising tide left him behind.
I can't speak for Andrew Ng - but my take is he did out of pure altruism - love. just in terms of advancing free education e.g coursera & the free machine learning courses etc he brought to the masses.
not everyone does things to be rich.
> He sort of left OpenAI before it really hit the inflection point
Sorry I'm out of the loop... What inflection point are you referring to?
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.
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!".
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.
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
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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.
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OpenAI seems to be dumping a LOT of money into marketing on social media at least.
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Curious what you mean by killing it? Products? Model quality?
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really - what am i missing?
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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.
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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?
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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, ...
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.
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...
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?
We are in the early stages of AI. Anthropic is Altavista and OpenAI is AskJeeves or something. 10-20 years from now the scene will be unrecognizable and all of this will be inconsequential but at the same time it is the fondation on which tomorrow is built.
Well, one big difference now is that you need to billions to become the next big player. The barriers to entry are incredibly high, if you plan on competing against the big players.
Of course, there could be some future lab or startup which completely revolutionizes the field by going for some approach that doesn't require a boatload of money to train a model, but for now, we're stuck with the LLMs and the costs they come with..
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.
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.
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.
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So Google remains as Google
But do I leave all my money in US index funds?
It's the safer bet.
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Which funds?
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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
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?
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.
Looks like they sprinkled their ipo money on him.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anyone have any stats on just what the headcount is at Anthropic and OpenAI these days?
Who cares mate?
This is an extremely valid opinion.
Interesting if his educational startup turned out to be less perspective at least with the current gen of llms.
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.
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This is good he is best of best
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.
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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
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.
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this pre-IPO is gonna be incredible
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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.
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I've never heard of any of those other harnesses
Having crappy limits, lots of down times, 4.7opus isn't all that.
Tim Abbott the Zulip guy.
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
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.
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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.
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True.
I would like to announce I've retired. The tech industries are screwed and the future is paper.
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.
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
Why is this title not editorialized like others when it's ambiguous?
It feels like every single tweet he makes is a hit
> 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."
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 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...
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.
Well at least he knows what not to do now.
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.
Does this count as news now on HN?
And now, a message from an actual deck chair on the Titanic
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?
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.
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.
https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/2056753169888334312
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For better or worse, that's where his audience is.
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The honest reality that people actually like X and use it. They don't make it a point to show off their virtues by boycotting it. Nearly everyone important in the space uses it.
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Anthropic just bought compute off XAI so he's more tightly bound not less.
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I don't care what their AI is used to generate, as I see that as the user's problem both legally and morally. But I'll be damned if any actions I take make Musk any wealthier, considering what he's doing with what he already has.
Nobody who isn't fully on board with white supremacy (et tu, Andrej?) should be using Twitter at this point.
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.
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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
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Why is this tweet on homepage...
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go away. this isnt reddit
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.
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.