Andrej Karpathy is back in frontier AI research, this time at one of OpenAI’s fiercest rivals.
The OpenAI co-founder said he has joined Anthropic, where he expects to return to research and development work focused on large language models. The move brings one of AI’s most recognizable researchers into the Claude maker’s orbit as Anthropic continues competing with OpenAI for talent, customers, and market momentum.
“I’ve joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative,” he wrote in an X post. “I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D.”
The move signals how aggressively frontier AI companies are still competing for the researchers shaping the next generation of large language models.
On again, off again with OpenAI
As CNBC reported, Karpathy’s role with OpenAI was inconsistent from the start. Although he helped co-found the company in 2015, his tenure there lasted only two years before he was poached by another co-founder, Elon Musk.
While Karpathy eventually rejoined OpenAI in 2023, his second stint with the company was even shorter than the first. He left in early 2024 to pursue a brand new venture known as Eureka Labs.
Establishing Eureka Labs
Eureka Labs, which focuses on AI education and advocacy, was established in July 2024.
Their initial offering centers on an undergraduate AI course called LLM101n. Although the course has not yet been released, the potential curriculum includes advanced studies in language modeling, machine learning, tokenization, LLM optimization, deployment, and more.
Karpathy spoke excitedly about the launch of Eureka Labs back in 2024 when he posted, in part: “While my work in AI took me from academic research at Stanford to real-world products at Tesla and AGI research at OpenAI, all of my work combining the two so far has only been part-time, as side quests to my ‘real job’, so I am quite excited to dive in and build something great, professionally and full-time.”
It’s unclear if Karpathy is still associated with Eureka Labs at the time of this writing.
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Tumultuous times with Tesla
During his first tenure at OpenAI, Karpathy was eventually tapped to conduct pro bono AI research for one of Elon Musk’s other companies, Tesla. He officially joined the automotive company in 2017 as the director of artificial intelligence, but, after taking a short sabbatical, Karpathy ultimately left in 2022.
Karpathy’s future with Anthropic
Despite a rocky road so far, Karpathy’s future with Anthropic is bright. Not only is he recognized as one of the earliest pioneers of LLMs and generative AI, but he’s also worked with some of the biggest and most reputable names in the industry thus far.
For his latest role, Karpathy is being tapped to build an internal team focused on pretraining research for Anthropic’s flagship AI platform, Claude. With his combination of education and hands-on experience, Karpathy might just be the best man for the job.
Also read: Anthropic acquired Stainless, a developer tools startup used by OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic itself.
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