Andrej Karpathy, who co-founded OpenAI and previously worked and previously led AI at Tesla, has joined Anthropic.
“I joined Anthropic,” Karpathy said Posted in X on tuesday. “I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be particularly formative. I’m excited to join the team here and get back to R&D.”
Karpathy started this week at Anthropic, where he works in pre-production under team lead Nick Joseph. According to the company, pre-training Clo is responsible for large-scale training runs that give her basic knowledge and skills. This is also one of the most expensive, computationally intensive steps in building a boundary model.
An Anthropic spokesperson told TechCrunch that Karpathy will lead a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pre-training research.
Karpathy is one of the few researchers who can bridge the gap between LLM theory and large-scale training practice. Tapping it to form such a team is a clear sign from Anthropic that it believes that AI-driven research, rather than pure computing, will remain competitive with OpenAI and Google.
While at OpenAI, Karpathy focused on deep learning and computer vision until he left to join Tesla in 2017. He led Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) and Autopilot programs before departing in 2022.
He then returned to OpenAI for a year before leaving again in 2024 Launch Eureka LabsA startup dedicated to applying AI assistants to education.
Karpathy hasn’t shared many updates about Eureka Labs since its launch, and it’s unclear whether the prominent researcher will continue with the startup. also taught an online course called Neural Networks: Zero to Hero It helps students learn to build neural networks from scratch in code, and it YouTube channel where he posts part-time lectures on LLM and AI.
“I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to continue my work in it in due course,” Karpathy said.
TechCrunch has reached out to Karpathy for comment.
Separately, there is also Anthropic brought Chris Rohlf to the border red team that stress-tests advanced AI models against severe threats. Rohlf is a cybersecurity industry veteran with over 20 years of experience. He previously worked at Yahoo’s respected cybersecurity team known as the Paranoids, and more recently at Meta, where he worked for six years before joining Anthropic. Rohlf was also a fellow at the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technologies, where he worked on the CyberAI project.
“We have a real opportunity to significantly improve cybersecurity with artificial intelligence,” Rohlf said. Type in X. “I can’t think of a better company or team to join at this critical time.”
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