Anthropic hires OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy, former Tesla AI lead

Andrej Karpathy, artificial intelligence researcher who co-founded OpenAI before being kidnapped by Tesla’sHe announced on Tuesday that he would be joining Anthropic.

“I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be particularly formative,” Karpathy wrote. a post on xrefers to large language models. “I am very excited to join the team here and return to R&D.”

Anthropic said Karpathy will start this week and build a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pre-training research that helps the company’s models gain essential knowledge and skills.

It’s the latest high-profile hire for Anthropic, which is poised to surpass OpenAI’s private market valuation and is in an increasingly intense battle for talent with its chief AI rival. xAI founding member and former Tesla employee Ross Nordeen said: at the beginning of this month He was joining Anthropic the same day the company struck a deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to lease computing capacity at xAI’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee.

After helping launch OpenAI, Karpathy Tesla’s He will serve as AI director in 2017. There he led Tesla Autopilot’s computer vision team.

While Musk steered Karpathy away from OpenAI, the Tesla CEO was a board member at both tech companies. Karpathy’s work at OpenAI and Tesla led to Musk v., which resulted in a jury and judge ruling in favor of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Monday. It came up many times during the Altman trial.

In an email exchange presented as an exhibit during the hearing, Musk described Karpathy as “unquestionably the world’s No. 2 man in computer vision,” behind Ilya Sutskever, another OpenAI co-founder.

“The OpenAI guys will want to kill me, but it had to be done…” Musk wrote about hiring Karpathy.

Karpathy was one of several OpenAI employees Musk borrowed from OpenAI to work unpaid for months at Tesla, where the development of autonomous vehicles was not going as fast as promised. Karpathy left Tesla in 2022, and the company still doesn’t sell a vehicle that’s safe to drive without a human driver ready to steer or brake at all times.

After leaving Tesla, Karpathy briefly returned to OpenAI before founding AI education startup Eureka Labs, where he works until now. Karpathy has a PhD in computer science from Stanford.

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