New Delhi: OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy has left the company to join another major organisation in the booming AI sector, Anthropic. Karpathy shared
this news on X, stating that he had been working on education-related projects for the past few months and was now “very excited” to get back to research.
Later Karpathy confirmed that he would be joining its pretraining division, which creates and tests large-scale models behind the Claude AI models. He will be reporting to Nicholas Joseph, another former member of OpenAI who is at Anthropic, according to reports. The position follows closely on the heels of a slew of recent hiring efforts by big tech companies vying to land seasoned researchers and engineers.
Andrej Karpathy returns to AI research
Karpathy believes the next few years will be critical for the development of AI. He said at the time of his announcement of his new job that he would like to continue working in the field of education as well as his research.
He is known for his technical expertise and his ability to explain complex concepts in a comprehensible way, earning him a strong reputation in the field of artificial intelligence. Karpathy got himself into a position of being widely known by students, developers and AI enthusiasts through his online lectures, coding tutorials and educational videos.
From OpenAI to Tesla and back
Karpathy was a founding research scientist at OpenAI and served there from 2015 to 2017. In those days, OpenAI started to build up its fame around the globe for its advancements in AI studies.
He later joined Tesla as Director of AI, where he was the leader of the Autopilot computer vision team. He specialised in enhancing road perception, traffic patterns, and their surroundings for vehicles using AI systems.
In 2023, Karpathy once again joined OpenAI. As the leadership turmoil unfolded over the future of CEO Sam Altman, he openly voiced his support for Altman.
He left OpenAI in February 2024, though, and founded an AI startup called Eureka Labs, which creates learning tools using AI. He also acquired the title of “vibe coding”, a code name for software and app development based on AI-generated text prompts.
Academic background and research work
Karpathy was born in what was then Czechoslovakia and studied computer science and physics at the University of Toronto and obtained a master’s degree at the University of British Columbia.
In 2015, he finished his PhD at Stanford University with Fei-Fei Li, a world-leading computer vision researcher. His research was in neural networks, computer vision and natural language processing, which are all essential components of modern AI systems.
Throughout the years, Karpathy gained great recognition as an educator in the field of AI, known for his ability to make complex technical concepts easy and accessible to understand.
