Anthropic taps former OpenAI co-founder and Tesla veteran Andrej Karpathy to lead AI research

Andrej Karpathy, former OpenAI cofounder and AI executive at Tesla, has now announced to join Anthropic. Karpathy shared an X post announcing the transformation to the Research and Development team, marking another high-profile talent move in the intensifying artificial intelligence race.

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Anthropic poaches AI researcher

It is reported that Karpathy has already started at Anthropic this week and will build a team dedicated to using Claude for advancing pretraining research. However, he will be working under team lead Nick Joseph on pre-training, which is one of the most important stages in developing advanced AI models like Claude.

In an X post, Karpathy said, “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,” he added. 

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Karpathy is one of the well-known researchers in the tech field, and he is known for his cofounding journey at OpenAI. However, later he joined Elon Musk’s Tesla in 2017 as the director of artificial intelligence. 

Later in 2022, Karpathy departed Tesla, with the company’s vehicles still requiring driver supervision for steering and braking. Following his exit, he spent a short stint at OpenAI before founding Eureka Labs,  a startup dedicated to applying AI to education.

Andrej Karpathy is considered one of the rare AI experts who understands the theoretical side of large language models (LLMs), as well as conceptually, and the practical side of training them at a massive scale using real-world infrastructure and computing systems. By hiring an AI researcher, Anthropic is signalling its broader AI strategy for staying competitive rather than simply spending enormous amounts on computing power.