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 UTCMy “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.
If money was not an issue he could just build that environment for himself.
Which raises the question: what can he do at Anthropic that he couldn't on his own?
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.
This is my assumption.
> there's the uncertainty, will the AI "wars" be some winner-takes-all situation? Will the smaller labs eventually be acquired by the bigger ones, will they simply wash away if there's a crash?
He's Andrej Karpathy. He could wait to let the winner surface. Obviously better to get in with the winner earlier. But worse to get on the wrong team versus on the right team late.
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
That implies Karpathy is either dumb or desperate and he is neither of those by a long shot.
Last thing I saw Karpathy talk about was this, which I find hard to believe that it came from a smart person.
I think Andrej has the experience (and now ressources) to productionize their research into something very interesting.
Sorry I'm out of the loop... What inflection point are you referring to?
So pretty sure the original poster is talking about 2017.
Regardless of what Anthropic’s share price is, OpenAI has been fucking killing it recently. I don’t take particular pleasure in saying that.
Example 1, just from top of my mind, Composer 2.5 released today. Go look at their benchmark.
Composer 2.5 and Opus 4.7 ranked around the same, meanwhile gpt-5.5 was miles ahead.
You wouldn’t have caught me dead using a gpt model 2 years ago
What codex is a few steps away from doing is changing fundamentally a lot of workflows.
Remote codex with their computer use is basically you at your computer doing things, 24/7.
Then they added gpt images 2.0
what codex can do, in a few more iterations of codex, is show you visually side by side “would you prefer this (A) or that (B)” in a series of questions. This was what some open source researchers have been up to. That’s no longer guessing.
I’m not trying to hype a company i have no stake in, but they’ve been killing it.
Tbf though, I think it’s disingenuous to say “in the real world” to an actual user. How did you mean that?
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
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
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?
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 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.
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.
rvz•57m ago
Maybe the IPO potential was just too great to ignore and maybe AGI (A Giant IPO) is around the corner.
reducesuffering•48m ago
whywhywhywhy•15m ago
f311a•46m ago
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.