Anthropic was founded by OpenAI exiles. Adds one more. Andrej Karpathy, former co-founder of OpenAI, on Tuesday Announced in X he will join Anthropic, working on the lab’s research and development team.
“Personal update: I joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs are going to be particularly formative” he wrote. “I’m excited to join the team here and get back into R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to continue my work in this area in due course.”
Karpathy had an on-again, off-again relationship with OpenAI, serving as a founding member and research scientist of the group from 2015 to 2017, before Elon Musk poached him to serve as Tesla’s chief AI director. He reconnected OpenAI stopped in 2023 and about a year ago walks away again After the highly dramatic and short-lived ouster of Sam Altman as CEO — though Karpathy denied that his exit had anything to do with the whole situation.
It is hard not to read Carpathian’s transition to Anthropic in the context of the Cold War between the two great frontier labs. Not only is Anthropic mostly made up of OpenAI shipments, it’s also starting to operate in an “enemy of my enemy is my friend” style. Earlier this month, Anthropic announced its departure Start using the computing power provided by SpaceX (née xAI) despite CEO Elon Musk repeatedly calling the company “evil.” It turns out that he must think he’s less evil than the Sam Altman-led OpenAI, and given that his A lawsuit to punish Altman was unsuccessfulit can also support its biggest rival.
Karpathy, who coined the term “vibe-coding,” will reportedly join Anthropic’s pre-prep lab. For Axiosand will help launch a new team focused on using Claude, the company’s advanced artificial intelligence model, to accelerate pre-training research.
We’ll have to see how that goes. Karpati’s credentials are pretty much unassailable, but he’s certainly a bit above the delivery of AI gimmicks at times. He he called moltbook, A social network for AI agents“next to the most incredible sci-fi flight I’ve seen recently” – only to reveal most of the content on the site actually man-made. Earlier this year, he described himself as “in a state of AI psychosis” and said he embraced “tokenmaxxing,” the practice of using as many tokens as possible to maximize your AI usage. whether it is really necessary.
Whether Anthropic acquires industry icon Karpathy or AI-adapted Karpathy, just getting it is a coup for the company in terms of attracting talent. This suggests that serious minds in the space are turning away from Anthropic, or at least Altman. Whatever the price tag for bringing it in, it might be worth it just to reinforce the idea that there is a place to be Anthropic.
