Source: https://www.axios.com/2026/05/19/anthropic-openai-karpathy-a...
> 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!
I couldn’t help myself but consider this mostly a very inefficient variant of hyperparameter optimization, but someone correct me if I’m wrong, I may be looking at this too pessimistic.
Many people are still deluded and think he is the same person who wrote the informal AI tutorials in plain html. He isn't, he is selling stuff now.
It might be Elon who went and said that and said they don’t need lidar, but as director of AI and auto vision Karpathy bears the responsibility for those features.
Except the good companies probably dont make you do silly stupid outdated interview practices without the tools you can actually use on the job today, right?
I even share his concern about struggling to keep pace with the rate of change lately, and agree that my working in a frontier lab or any other such environment would certainly help with that!
I have a weird background mix of analytic philosophy, linguistics/NLP, propaganda research, and long-term institutional data science/strategy work, which unfortunately does not make ATS systems especially low-friction as I try to jump industries.
So I keep busy the best I can: lately building tooling around runtime observability, intent legibility, and intervention in LLM systems.
Some small public artifacts finally going up: https://huggingface.co/spaces/anotheruserishere/Cartogemma
Eh. Worth a shot!
There's a choice to be made between helpfully defeating someone's ATS and searching for more clueful employers. I'll probably be walking paper resumes into local offices next time around anyhow.
I learned speed cubing from badmefisto when I was in middle school, ~16yr ago (today my ao100 is ~15s).
I never knew it was Karpathy. What an insane knowledge drop. Thanks for sharing!
1. Copernican Revolution -> We aren't the center of the universe
2. The Darwinian Revolution -> We aren't the pinnacle of life
3. The Freudian Revolution -> We aren't even in control of our own minds
4. The "Intuitive AI" Revolution -> We aren't the only form of intelligence
I think even a month ago I would've read this article and scoffed, but having used Claude Code almost exclusively at work for the last couple months it seems pretty undeniable that in-context-learning and a good enough harness is all you need to displace most "thinking" jobs that require just a bachelors. The hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into data center build-out basically hinges on this thesis, and frankly I trust the judgements of the billionaires financing these deals better than LLM-naysayers on hackernews (not to mention the non-public info they have access to). You don't need to reach superintelligence to still deeply, deeply affect society, and I think Anthropic was the first to build products that are actually good enough and, critically, hands-off enough to do just this. Every day it's clearer and clearer to me that "I was born into a poor family but am relatively intelligent and good at learning things, therefore I can find success" is exactly what will ultimately be eliminated as the outcome of this unless we get the government to step in and regulate.
I could go on and on, but the main point I'm trying to make is that you should definitely examine unease you feel about Anthropic, consider framing that unease in the context of Hinton's argument, and ask yourself what the implications may be.
Nicely put, unconsciously this was my mindset in my 20s. In my 30s, I started questioning myself how come so many stupid people achieve great success. There must be more to success than just being relatively intelligent (just look into politicians - forgive generalization).
Once a nagging thought, now I find some comfort in it.
Didnt he say there wont be any need for radiologists?
I actually think both perspectives can be true. If you look at (IMO) the most rational takes of "LLM-naysayers on hackernews", it's not that LLMs are useless, but it's that they're still just tools, and while they can do a lot of high-level "rearranging of past experience" that looks an awful lot like intelligence, human intelligence is still required for lots of higher level thinking tasks, and there look to be limits to the "just scale" approach.
The problem is there are still tons of jobs that actually don't require much high-level, human-only thinking where it's easy to see a clear path where AI obliterates all those jobs pretty quickly. Automating those jobs will still be probably one of the largest wealth transfers in history from labor to capital.
2. Most entry level jobs for current graduates in white collar fields. (See hiring rates for these positions)
3. Thousands of layoffs (mostly attributed to AI use, while not 100%, the Anthropic's specific marketing push has a huge influence on this - unlike OAI and other labs)
4. All low-code products/startups
5. Web agencies who did small websites for local businesses
While AI industry push is there for all of the above, Anthropic's specific marketing/PR is specifically directed towards forced adoption of AI and burning tokens, unlike from other labs.
Similar sentiment shared with other startup founders- check on x about all VCs talking about moats against big labs.
— Ram, Tron (1982)
I am working on a short story on this topic which is set in 2100s, where most humans have internalized the concept of 'having enough' after the great conflict. But some specimen have started to show signs of this syndrome again, and neuroscientists and psychologists are grappling to understand where it originated from.
This doesn't automatically make them the great virtuous team. It just means the rest of the pack are toxic as all hell.
>I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.
There is no universe where this can be described as anything close to ethical.
Anthropic played a really well orchestrated marketing gimmick so that they would be in the headlines for a couple days bringing awareness to non-tech people on how they are supposedly the good guys. They then backpedaled all of this and are in contract with the DoD once the headlines passed.
But this obviously worked as you now believe they are the good guys
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/01/pentagon-anthropic-blacklist...
[1] https://www.techradar.com/ai-platforms-assistants/anthropic-...
This good guy ("AI Safety") versus bad guy is all marketing gimmicks. I'm old enough that it reminds me of Google "don't be evil".
What I find worse is that some people actually believe Anthropic are really the good guys.
Why should I trust that your assessment is correct? Is it likely to ever be correct in the case of a doctor/mechanical engineer/athlete/economist/whatever? So why do so many people insist that an incredibly intelligent AI researcher has fallen into some obvious trap?
Like specifically what has he done?
- At Stanford, Led research on the first (to my knowledge) crop of joint image/text models. Super widely cited work.
- At Tesla, led their whole self driving effort for a while, came up with critical techniques that allowed them to make progress (e.g., the concept of "auto labelling": using a much larger NN to generate training data with which to train smaller models that could fit in the on-device compute. IIRC, Elon said they would not have been able to make progress without this insight).
I'm not sure his educative efforts for the mold of what you're looking for, but if so, the course he designed at Stanford (and availed online):for neural networks, as well as his blog posts, (most famous of which, to my knowledge, is "the unreasonable effectiveness of LSTMs"), made a huge impact on educating a generation of tinkerers and researchers.
I was more looking for signal that him + Anthropic might yield something beyond a step-change from Opus 4.7 (disappointing so far). We have not gotten to use Mythos yet, I wonder if that will become Opus 5 or something.
Works where archive.ph is blocked, no CAPTCHA, no Javascript, no DDoS directed at blogger
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA23AbWR...
x=https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA23AbWR/
#tnftp -4o"|grep -o '<p>.*</p>'|tr -d '\134'" $x > 1.htm
#links 1.htm
curl -HAccept: -HUser-Agent: $x|grep -o '<p>.*</p>'|tr -d '\134' > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htmMaybe the IPO potential was just too great to ignore and maybe AGI (A Giant IPO) is around the corner.
I, personally, don't think there will be a better time for researchers to make so much money in a few years in any future of LLMs.
It's good that there are avenues today for people to make tens or hundreds of $m in salaried positions at companies so that they don't have to do that stuff to get paid their value if they don't genuinely want to.
Which raises the question: what can he do at Anthropic that he couldn't on his own?
And then there's the uncertainty, will the AI "wars" be some winner-takes-all situation? Will the smaller labs eventually be acquired by the bigger ones, will they simply wash away if there's a crash?
I don't know. If you can land some exceptional gig at the big firms, maybe the financials are good enough to not start your own lab. Minimizing risk, and all that.
EDIT: Assuming such a startup would focus on frontier models.
This is my assumption.
> there's the uncertainty, will the AI "wars" be some winner-takes-all situation? Will the smaller labs eventually be acquired by the bigger ones, will they simply wash away if there's a crash?
He's Andrej Karpathy. He could wait to let the winner surface. Obviously better to get in with the winner earlier. But worse to get on the wrong team versus on the right team late.
We ban accounts that do this and I don't want to ban you, so please write everything that you post to HN by hand.
Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but we're getting complaints about some of your posts and, upon inspection, the complaints seem justified.
So, does Anthropic pivot to military tech or pretend to do so before the IPO?
Or is this simply a deal where he uses his formidable influencer skills for Anthropic and gets to cash in on the IPO?
- best harness overall (well maybe until like a month ago when gpt5.5 and codex came out)
- acquires bun
- acquires stainless for SDKs
- deal with Elon for compute
- karpathy
what else did I miss?
2. Mixed for the entire bun ecosystem, especially with the Rust, Anthropic-focused rewrite
3. Good, because Anthropic's SDK was one of the worst ones to use.
4. Deal with the guy that has a shit ton of compute around wasting money because no-one uses Grok and was frequently calling Anthropic "Misanthropic".
https://i.redd.it/kp4uy1egspjg1.png
5. Glorified marketer whose probably greatest achievement in pushing AI forward was instructing on CS 231n and coining the term vibe coding.
Yeah, on a roll.
1. Claude Code is widely used and beloved despite not benchmaxxing on the terminalbench like these harnesses that nobody has ever heard of or uses.
5. Karpathy's contributions are way more than CS 231n and coining vibe coding. In terms of pedagogy, his "zero to hero" videos, nanoGPT, etc, are all great. For actual work, he also built a great org at Tesla.
Nope. That's 100% me.
And 2 years is probably pretty average for the whole tech industry.
maybe for a fungible CRUD engineer. I think Karpathy is in a different league and I'm certainly surprised to hear this fact. I would expect someone like him to sit within a certain lab for a long time
And I work in games and 2-3 years at each company is pretty normal, with some exceptions people just finish a project and then move(or are let go, unfortunately). YMMV of course.
- barely qualified, leaving to avoid getting PIP'ed
- overqualified/under-leveled, and moving is faster than getting promoted
No, you won't get your double lifespan or miracle cures and will die like the rest of us plebs.
1) advancements in AI are made by large teams of brilliant people (and individuals who take outsized credit)
2) AGI is defintionless buzz word
3) advancements in AI will need significant changes in either how the model works or fundamentally new non existent datasets.
You don't need to live in the bay area, most civilized places on earth let you live a comfortable life with a 10th of the salary, plus you are not selling your soul.
We are doing interesting R&D in other fields too, in places you would never believe.
Do you really want to be the person that hands this kind of tech to corporates? Or that does anything to benefit those corporates?
im also going to guess that whatever research he does would be free roam research that primarily serves to market the fact that claude was able to help perform the research.
the visible stuff he's been working on has been mostly agent soft skills. off the top of my head is autoresearch and his the wiki knowledge stuff. nothing particularly groundbreaking, but has helped devs expand their understanding of the utility that these models can provide.
not a diss to andrej i know he's reading this now
I think Andrej has the experience (and now ressources) to productionize their research into something very interesting.
That implies Karpathy is either dumb or desperate and he is neither of those by a long shot.
Generally, when a "good" developer has a huge public presence and reputation, that's quite valuable to a company when they're competing in a tough space. Many a time, more so than the (very high) technical skill of the developer in question.
I've seen large funded companies gather good popular developers like pokemon cards and just have them go around give talks and write blog posts. It creates an aura around them which makes things like hiring, fund raising etc. much easier.
So, it's not really a statement about Karpathy himself. It's more about the company hiring him.
Andrej seems like a great guy, but him joining Anthropic feels a bit like a transactional relationship (old guy marries hot young chick). Anthropic get a "glorified marketer", and he gets a first row seat at SOTA LLM dev 2026. I don't think they hired him expecting he's going to change the direction/pace of their research.
This kind of thing happens to big names in software all the time. Carmack going to Facebook is a prime example - he joined with the idea of using all those resources to build world-changing tech, and instead he ended up headlining conferences, and fighting a losing battle against the corporate types who were put in charge of Oculus.
Last thing I saw Karpathy talk about was this, which I find hard to believe that it came from a smart person.
But he has always been known for his communication rather than his research. He got famous by putting out a (very well made) course on machine learning that was available to the public. Since graduating he hasn't exactly delivered on revolutionary new stuff at the businesses that employed him but he has continued to be extremely good at communicating thoughts about the current and future state of AI. Businesses want that and he knows that he can deliver that.
meanwhile in the real world:
claude --permission-mode=auto --model=opus -p '/onboard --user=karpathy'Sorry I'm out of the loop... What inflection point are you referring to?
So pretty sure the original poster is talking about 2017.
And tesla is not a good place for science development. Tesla is structured from narcissistic mindset: results driven, cynical, and position-based. This doesn’t bode well for long term sciences.
I dont see how he could be helping anthropic
Regardless of what Anthropic’s share price is, OpenAI has been fucking killing it recently. I don’t take particular pleasure in saying that.
Edit: My lens is meritocratic. My experience is as an extremely heavy user of both company’s full suite of products in the range of 5 digits per month. My interest is better products not hype.
Can you cite specifics? "I won't speak bad about someone, but also won't speak good about others" resulted in a comment that seems to contribute nothing
A hyped name means nothing to me, how will Karpathy make Claude Code better?
I’m super happy seeing a small product manager like Tibo fucking crushing it on Codex
What codex is a few steps away from doing is changing fundamentally a lot of workflows.
Remote codex with their computer use is basically you at your computer doing things, 24/7.
Then they added gpt images 2.0
what codex can do, in a few more product iterations, is show you visually side by side “would you prefer this (A) or that (B)” in a series of questions. This is what some open source researchers have been up to. That’s no longer guessing.
I’m not trying to hype a company i have no stake in, but they’ve been killing it.
It’s extremely compute intensive, but also very satisfying.
Example 1, just from top of my mind, Composer 2.5 released today. Go look at their benchmark.
Composer 2.5 and Opus 4.7 ranked around the same, meanwhile gpt-5.5 was miles ahead.
You wouldn’t have caught me dead using a gpt model 2 years ago
He had both the technical and executive authority to determine if the product was fit for customer usage. He had direct executive responsibility for the product on the road between 2017-2022.
If he, the lead architect and executive responsible felt the product was dangerous and then he was overridden, he can not get away with claiming he was “just following orders”, he had a moral duty to not sign-off or quit otherwise he is clearly complicit in deploying a dangerous product for his own self-enrichment.
When people talk about engineering ethics, this is literally a completely uncontroversial textbook example. The only way you accept this is if you do not want ethics in engineering.
Furthermore, he was extremely hireable with numerous job opportunitys available to him. He would not be destitute or even particularly worse off if he did quit for ethical reasons. Any self-preservation defense is also invalid.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/20/tesla-hires-deep-learning-...
When rumors started that GPT-4 design would be kept secret, he likely wanted to know what architecture it would be. Perhaps he left Tesla, waited out the non-compete clause, and joined OpenAI to learn its details.
When Mythos dropped, there were hints that it had a new architecture. He might similarly want to know how it works.
Either way, there is enough cross-lab hiring that those secrets eventually get known, but only by the labs.
It actually feels like a signal that it is in a tapering phase.
As in, if it was in a growth phase a freeform, solo - collab with who you want, would be more beneficial. But in a tapering phase you'd want structure and to be in the private formal meetings.
just an idea
Growth is when you want to have institutional support, to be at the tip, backed by infinite money and best compute infra, and benefit disproportionally from compounding. Conversely tapering is when you're best flying under the radar, and there's plenty of value both in ideas and in hardware, as the leading players shed excess they can't support anymore, ...
But to your point, then the growth is not in the ideas that can be generated with AI, and more in the structure. Which feels like a different stage. Maybe "growth", wasn't a good word.
Stuff is still happening and you need to be part of a big lab to see it. NanoGPT is fun but at some point you need that datacenter.
I also feel like there are many ways he can access compute for use of his own ideas.
Of course, there could be some future lab or startup which completely revolutionizes the field by going for some approach that doesn't require a boatload of money to train a model, but for now, we're stuck with the LLMs and the costs they come with..
OpenAI looks a lot more like early Yahoo -- earlier, quite a spectacle at first, definitely a game-changer and disruptor, but overspent, less focused, and subject to slow collapse under its own fragmentation and lack of overwhelming clarity of mission and purpose.
All that said, history rhymes but does not repeat, and trying to map present-day companies onto previous generations is an exercise in futility. The future is fundamentally unique.
Looking familiar: VTI or VOO, VTSAX or VFIAX
That reminds me about Don Quijote
"Dime con quién andas, y decirte he quién eres."
From Karpathy's various interviews I get the impression that he wants to leave the door open to working for Musk again at some point, perhaps on TeslaBot.
With Musk for now regarding Anthropic as a partner (or at least an enemy of his enemy), that seems to mean that Karpathy joining them is less likely to anger Musk than might otherwise have been the case. Who knows, maybe Karpathy was involved in brokering this data center deal?
Compare and contrast with working at OpenAI, Google, etc.?
(I also assume they gave him a ton of independence in R&D)
Leaving OpenAI to work for Elon Musk was a poor move, and AFAIK his work on CV at Tesla did not bring anything groundbreaking, unfortunately probably the opposite (the bet on camera-only driven system did not pay off) and his talks about the approach would indicate that his whole idea to make it work was nothing more than hill-climbing.
Also, his over-reaction to the whole Claw thing was a bit ridiculous, in my opinion.
I don't see him as a Scientist in the field, but more as an efficient tinkerer.
This is a pretty unsubstantiated claim. Tesla is now launching robotaxis at a fraction of the cost of Waymos, in part because they don't need all the Lidar.
But Tesla has been promising full self-driving "next year" for quite a long time now, and it seems they are stuck at the "95% there" stage basically forever.
But - unpopular opinion - I believe Anthropic is one open-source model away (that can code well) from a massive revenue/stock crash. We're already seeing Claude's cost escalate to astronomical levels. Most coding work is medium difficulty in the grand scheme of things. So the future is an open source model small enough to fit in your local 16GB VRAM, giving you a Claude Code like experience for zero token cost. That's going to wipe out most of Anthropic's current revenue base. It does have several cool initiatives in the pipeline, but bad things happen once your bread and butter is threatened (just ask OpenAI).
(If they were just burning Capex and nobody wanted to use their product or their gross margins were bad then I'd agree with you)
I hope he still gets to do some educative stuff on the side too
Anthropic: Okay, let's add two zeroes
Andrej: I am very excited to join Anthropic!
(I do not blame him, I think this is reasonable, I find the whole money-falling-from-the-sky thing amusing :-)
I have no idea if Andrej "sold out" but perhaps he realizes that if he wants to work on the cutting edge alongside talented people, with a seemingly endless budget, Anthropic is a good choice.
I chose my employers for the same reason; the compensation was secondary.
There's some poetry there that I am unable to capture with words.
When I left MS, a full Windows build was about 18M LOC. The fact that 18 million lines of code, written by tens of thousands of engineers, worked at all was a mini miracle.
With regard to compensation: like Karpathy, I had already earned enough to be comfortable for the rest of my life. Once money stopped being the primary driver, I was able to focus on what made me happy. Building things, even if you don't like them, brought me happiness and fulfillment. I hope Andrej finds the same at Anthropic.
One thing is that the companies are holding on because of competitive advantage, and I think another is that AI is such a politically polarizing topic that actually being open about everything is risky for the companies, wanting to avoid controversy.
If money was not an issue he could just build that environment for himself.
I mean short gig, few million dollars for Karpathy so makes sense for him but others should read the Cloudflare's report about the super scary model that Anthropic wouldn't release because they love humanity more than their balance sheet.
"However, it turns out, my deep passion can easily be put on hold with money. Also I'm not really sure what the definition of passionate is."
“According to reports from The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian, the AI model Claude, developed by Anthropic, was used in the initial U.S.-Israel military operations against Iran in late February 2026. The system, integrated into a platform developed by defense contractor Palantir, assisted with intelligence analysis, scenario planning, and targeting for strikes that resulted in the death of Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei”
https://biggo.com/news/202603032121_Anthropic_Claude_AI_Used...
Skynet is winning.
But what is the solution? I don’t think it is safe for a society built on free speech and other liberal values to have a couple extremely powerful companies controlling all our information and imposing their rules and their politics on top of us. It was bad enough under the FAANG companies. This will be worse.
Personally I’m not comfortable with how much power Anthropic is accumulating. And with them partnering shamelessly with Elon Musk to use a datacenter powered by potentially illegal natural gas turbines, I feel like Dario is just not trustworthy.
Andrej Karpathy - @karpathy
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.
May 19, 2026 · 3:05 PM UTCMy “entertainment”, or intrigue, comes from the ability to impact my life.
Other people sporting struggles to catch my attention longer than the play itself, for that reason.