Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic’s pretraining team

Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and former head of AI at Tesla, is joining Anthropic. Karpathy announced the move on X (formerly Twitter), writing that he is “very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D.”

At Anthropic, Karpathy will join the pretraining team, which handles the large-scale training runs that give the company’s Claude models their core knowledge and capabilities. According to Anthropic, he will build a new team focused on using Claude itself to speed up pretraining research, an approach sometimes described as AI helping to develop AI.

Nicholas Joseph, Anthropic’s Head of Pretraining and himself a former OpenAI employee, welcomed the hire on X (formerly Twitter), saying he could not think of anyone better suited for the role.

Karpathy has a broad background spanning academic research, industry leadership and public education. He earned his PhD at Stanford under Fei-Fei Li, helped launch CS231n, Stanford’s first deep learning course, and interned at Google Brain, Google Research and DeepMind. At Tesla, he led the computer vision team behind Autopilot from 2017 to 2022. He later returned to OpenAI, where he built a team focused on midtraining and synthetic data generation.

Since leaving OpenAI, Karpathy has built a large following as an AI educator through YouTube and X (formerly Twitter). He also founded Eureka Labs, an AI-focused online school. In his announcement, he said he remains “deeply passionate about education” and plans to return to that work “in time,” suggesting those efforts will be paused for now.

Sources: Axios, VentureBeat