Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI, has joined Anthropic. The 39-year-old announced his move to Anthropic on Tuesday, saying he was “very excited to join the team” and return to research and development.
“Personal update: I’ve joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative,” Karpathy wrote on X. “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 said that he will be a part of their pretraining team, which is responsible for large-scale testing of Claude. According to a Business Insider report, he will report to Nicholas Joseph, another former OpenAI employee.
Who is Andrej Karpathy?
Karpathy is a prominent name in tech circles, is well known for his foundational research and educational content. His hiring is being touted as a major win for Anthropic in the escalating AI wars.
Born in Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia), he moved to Canada with his family at the age of 15.
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He completed his Computer Science and Physics bachelor’s degrees at University of Toronto in 2009, and obtained a master’s degree from the University of British Columbia in 2011.
Karpathy received a PhD from in 2015 under the supervision of Fei-Fei Li. His PhD focused on convolutional/recurrent neural networks and their applications in computer vision, natural language processing and their intersection.
Andrej Karpathy’s career trajectory
Andrej Karpathy was one of the founding research scientists at OpenAI. He was at the startup between 2015 and 2017.
He later left the company to join as Director of AI, where he led the Autopilot computer vision team.
In 2023, Karpathy returned to OpenAI for a second stint. During the brief leadership crisis involving CEO Sam Altman, he publicly backed Altman.
However, he left OpenAI again in February 2024 and later went on to launch Eureka Labs, a company focused on AI-driven education.
Karpathy has been called one of the most important figures in AI and appeared on Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in AI list in 2024.
Interestingly, he is also the person who coined the term “vibe coding” to describe how AI tools use natural language prompts to build apps and write code.
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