Anthropic hires OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, former Tesla AI leader

Andrej Karpathy, a prominent figure in artificial intelligence who co-founded OpenAI and later led AI initiatives at Tesla, has announced his new role at Anthropic. In a message shared on X, Karpathy expressed his enthusiasm about re-entering research and development, stating, "I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative." Starting this week, Karpathy will join Anthropic's pretraining team, where he will play a crucial role in enhancing the capabilities of the company's Claude models. His focus will be on establishing a new team dedicated to leveraging Claude for advancing pretraining research. This move comes as Anthropic continues to attract top talent, positioning itself to potentially outpace OpenAI's valuation in the private market. The company is in a heated competition for skilled professionals, recently welcoming Ross Nordeen, another ex-Tesla employee and founding member of xAI. Karpathy's career saw a significant shift when he left OpenAI in 2017 to become Tesla's AI director, where he spearheaded the computer vision efforts for Tesla's Autopilot. His recruitment by Elon Musk, who was serving on the boards of both companies at the time, was described by Musk as a necessary step despite concerns from OpenAI leadership. The recent trial involving Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman highlighted Karpathy's contributions, as both his tenure at OpenAI and Tesla were discussed. Musk once referred to Karpathy as “arguably the #2 guy in the world in computer vision,” emphasizing his expertise in the field. After departing from Tesla in 2022, where the company has yet to release a fully autonomous vehicle, Karpathy briefly returned to OpenAI before founding AI education startup Eureka Labs. He holds a PhD in computer science from Stanford and is now set to make a significant impact at Anthropic.