Axios
Andrej Karpathy, one of the best-known AI researchers in the world and a founding member of OpenAI , announced Tuesday that he's joining rival AI lab Anthropic . Why it matters: The hire is a major coup for Anthropic in the high-stakes competition for elite AI talent — and another sign the company is emerging as a magnet for some of the industry's most respected technical minds. Driving the news: Karpathy will start this week on Anthropic's pre-training team, which is responsible for the massive training runs that give Claude its core knowledge and capabilities, according to Anthropic. Karpathy will help launch a new team focused on using Claude itself to accelerate pretraining research — an increasingly important frontier as AI companies race to automate parts of AI development. " 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," Karpathy said in a post on X. Between the lines: Karpathy is a rare AI figure with credibility across research, industry and education. He was a founding member of OpenAI before serving as Tesla's director of AI, where he led the computer vision team behind Autopilot. Karpathy coined the term "vibe coding" and recently described himself as being in a "state of AI psychosis" since December — embracing "tokenmaxxing" and aggressively stress-testing frontier models. Zoom out: Since leaving Tesla in 2022, Karpathy has become one of AI's most influential public educators, building a massive following through technical explainers and educational content on YouTube and X. He said Tuesday that he remains "deeply passionate about education" and plans to return to that work "in time." The bottom line: The AI race is often framed around massive funding rounds and scarce computing power. Just as important is the fierce competition for the small pool of researchers — like Karpathy — capable of advancing the frontier.
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