Andrej Karpathy, the influential 39-year-old Slovak-Canadian AI researcher and one of the original 11 co-founders of OpenAI, and former head of Tesla’s AI division, announced on Tuesday, May 19 that he’s joining rival lab Anthropic.As Karpathy posted from his account on the social network X: “Personal update: 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. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.”Anthropic’s current Head of Pretraining, Nicholas Joseph, also a former OpenAI alumnus, added more context to Karpathy’s new role at Anthropic in a post of his own on X, writing: “Excited to welcome Andrej to the Pretraining team! He’ll be building a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pretraining research itself. I can’t think of anyone better suited to do it — looking forward to what we build together!”An Anthropic spokesperson confirmed to VentureBeat via email that Karpathy will be starting a team focused on using Claude, Anthropic’s own, increasingly popular AI model, to accelerate pretraining research. This would put Anthropic further toward the overarching AI research goal of many around the world to develop “recursive self-improvement,” that is, AI that is capable of training its successors or upgrading itself with increasingly lesser, or ultimately no human intervention. The announcement came on the same day as the start of rival AI-focused tech firm Google’s annual I/O developer conference in its headquarters city of Mountain View, California, when many new releases and announcements were expected.Karpathy’s storied historyKarpathy is widely known for spanning three parts of the modern AI boom: academic research, big-company deployment and online education. His own website describes him as an AI researcher and educator who was a founding member of OpenAI, later served as Direc …
