Andrej Karpathy, a former Tesla AI executive and one of OpenAI's founding members, has joined Anthropic, the Claude maker, he announced on Tuesday. This move strengthens the company as it looks to dominate the AI race.
Karpathy's Role at 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," Karpathy said in an X post. He has joined Anthropic's pretraining team, responsible for the large-scale training runs that give Claude its core knowledge and capabilities. He started work this week and sits on the team of Nick Joseph, the company's head of pretraining.
Background and Influence
Karpathy, a highly influential member of the AI community, played a key role in developing Tesla's self-driving and artificial intelligence technology before leaving the firm in 2022. He studied under prominent Stanford AI scientist Fei-Fei Li and joined OpenAI as one of its earliest staffers, before moving to Tesla.
"I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time," Karpathy, who announced in 2024 that he was starting an AI-integrated education platform named Eureka Labs, said on X.
Industry Context
Karpathy's move follows that of John Schulman, another OpenAI co-founder, who left for Anthropic in 2024. The ChatGPT maker has seen a slew of executives leave the firm, including former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and former tech chief Mira Murati. Anthropic has been grappling with strong competition from rival frontier model developers such as OpenAI as they seek to create the most sophisticated models for cloud providers.
