OpenAI founding member Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic
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The news: Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla, has joined Anthropic to build a new team using Claude to accelerate the company’s pretraining research.
Karpathy started this week on Anthropic’s pretraining team, which is responsible for the large-scale training runs that give Claude its core knowledge and capabilities. He will report to Nick Joseph, the company’s head of pretraining, Anthropic told media.
“I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative,” Karpathy said in a post on X. “I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D.”
The context: Karpathy left OpenAI in 2017 to serve as Tesla’s director of AI, where he led the computer vision team behind Autopilot, before leaving in 2022, according to its LinkedIn profile.
He briefly returned to OpenAI, then in 2024 launched Eureka Labs, an AI education startup.
He said he remains “deeply passionate about education” and plans to return to that work “in time.”
The hire extends a run of senior appointments at Anthropic. John Schulman, another OpenAI co-founder, joined in 2024, and Ross Nordeen, a founding member of Elon Musk’s xAI, joined earlier this month.
The sources: Andrej Karpathy, Bloomberg, Reuters
