Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI co-founder and former Tesla executive, has joined Anthropic – adding to the artificial intelligence giant’s surging momentum.
Karpathy — considered to be one of the world’s top AI researchers — is working on the pre-training team which is responsible for “the large-scale training runs that give Claude its core knowledge and capabilities,” the company said.
The 39-year-old computer guru — who started his new gig at the Dario Amodei-led company this week — will build a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pre-training research, Anthropic said.
Karpathy’s name briefly came up in the three-week courtroom battle between Musk and OpenAI and Sam Altman.
Musk testified that he had poached Karpathy from OpenAI to join Tesla, but only after he had planned to leave the startup already.
OpenAI President Greg Brockman said Musk offered him “an apology and a confession,” about hiring Karpathy.
At Tesla, Karpathy led the computer vision team of Tesla Autopilot, the company’s self-driving unit. He left Tesla in 2022, according to his LinkedIn profile.
He holds a PhD in computer science from Stanford University and has spent the past few years developing educational AI content on YouTube and X.
“I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative,” Karpathy said in a post on X on Tuesday. “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.”
Anthropic said it also hired cybersecurity veteran Chris Rohlf to join its frontier red team, which tests advanced AI models against threats. Rohlf previously was security engineering director at Meta.
San Francisco-based Anthropic has morphed into the current AI darling as the popularity of its Claude tools has sent revenue surging and investors scrambling to scoop up shares. Its powerful new Mythos model has also whipped up excitement – and anxieties – over the power and risks of emerging AI tools.
The Post reported last month that one Silicon Valley dealmaker was so desperate for Anthropic stock that he was seeking to swap his 14-acre estate for shares of the AI giant.
Karpathy will serve on Nicholas Joseph’s pre-training team. “He’ll be building a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pretraining research itself,” Joseph posted on X. “I can’t think of anyone better suited to do it — looking forward to what we build together!”