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 this research into something very interesting.
p.s. called it
> Karpathy will help launch a new team focused on using Claude itself to accelerate pretraining research — an increasingly important frontier as AI companies race to automate parts of AI development. (https://www.axios.com/2026/05/19/anthropic-openai-karpathy-a...)
They just became "famous" because Karpathy is effectively an AI celebrity, so he could throw shit at a wall and post it on X and it would get 10k Github stars.
But seriously, people have been using the models to tweak hyperparemeters, or using LLMs to help create a second brain using markdown or json files or 100X other combinations of files, for a long time already.
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.
There’s a lot of value for the business world in learning AI from someone who has been at the top of their game but now is doing a general service by being a great educator and translator between the fields.
His recent Wiki approach may be simple to devs but is certainly an aha moment for the rest of the peanut gallery paying attention!
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.
Andrej seems like a great guy, but him joining Anthropic feels a bit like a transactional relationship (rich old guy marries hot young chick). Anthropic get a "glorified marketer", and he gets a front 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.
Scandalous!
A regular marriage is transactional to some extent too right, but not quite the same as Anna Nicole Smith marrying a 90yr old.
As an aside, an Indian guy I used to work with once explained to me how traditional Indian arranged marriages, like his own, work, and they are HIGHLY transactional. It's not just a matter of same caste, same social status etc, but an explicit trade off. In my co-worker's case he cheerfully told me how his wife was very dark skinned, therefore considered not that attractive/desirable (to other Indians!), but her family had money and social status so it was considered a fair trade for a nice looking boy like himself!
No it implies that he is more valuable for being famous than the hands-on work he can produce. This is the IC endgame
Last thing I saw Karpathy talk about was this, which I find hard to believe that it came from a smart person.
And, my objection was that he clearly had no understanding of the supply-chain risk he was worsening by advocating widespread use of Obsidian for agentic engineering tasks.
Since his announcement, Obsidian has taken proactive steps to mitigate the risks, or at least study threat model. Hopefully, they will implement proper RBAC or something before someone else with his visibility announces an even more irresponsible half-baked idea.
"Improve yourself, no mistakes" in a loop. Woooah sooo revolutionary...
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.
There are things that you can only explore and learn in those places, for obvious reasons.
I don't know his personal life goals but he's a great communicator and educator, if this decision makes him more up to date, and allows him to create even more relevant content then is something everyone will benefit. I understand the risks of being bias toward one company and not the other, but if you look at the content he created so far, he always talk principle first and specific tool later.
I think people here should give him the benefit of the doubt.
his value to Anthropic is his influence..he has over 2 million followers, and value is that he is the Top influencer for AI right now, like it or not. just like Selena Gomez might be for top for women age 21-29...
Every AI nerd I know reposts his (very thoughtful posts and projects mind you) like religon
meanwhile in the real world:
claude --permission-mode=auto --model=opus -p '/onboard --user=karpathy'All we hear is Altman, Musk, ...
Reason? What is the value of that other than entertainment? And it's not in the interest of companies to make celebrities that then are poach targets (if they can avoid they would yes there are exceptions as noted elsewhere in this thread).
And if you did 'hear' (via articles) to what extent what was said even be correct vs. a writer just fluffing things up to the max.
Tech is not sports where you can actually see the superlatives and know that the person who praise is being lavished on actually won or threw or caught and so on. (Or even music where you can hear it and see the stadium that is packed with fans..)
I suppose that with modern ML they can just toss it in the blender and reap the benefits ...
Apollo Go 100k driverless rides a day.
Tesla 0-5? driverless rides a day.
Sorry I'm out of the loop... What inflection point are you referring to?
Around the time Karpathy left, Ilya Sutskever, another OpenAI founder, started playing with Google's new "Transformer" architecture, which was the beginning of the "GPT" series, GPT-1, GPT-2 and eventually ChatGPT (GPT 3.5 + RLHF). In retrospect OpenAI's early Transformer experiments and GPT-1 was the inflection point that moved OpenAI from a company that wanted to build AI, as soon as anyone else did, to one that was actually doing so, although I think it would be revisionist for anyone to claim they knew what they were doing at the time. The early GPT-1 and GPT-2 papers read more like "wow, this is a bit unexpected, look at all of the things it can do!".
So pretty sure the original poster is talking about 2017.
not everyone does things to be rich.
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
OpenAI’s hiring recently has been much stronger, whether through luck or structure. The “no-name” guys have actual taste. I love that. I don’t care that they’re no-names.
I don’t know Karpathy personally, I won’t speak bad about a man I don’t know. I hope he makes CC better. I just read this as hype. My point is that there’s nothing he has that an empowered no-name product manager doesn’t. It’s like Alex Wang at Meta. That acq didn’t redeem Meta. They actually lost LeCun. Where’s Llama today?
Regardless of what Anthropic’s share price is, OpenAI has been fucking killing it recently. I don’t take particular pleasure in saying that, i’ve been a google and gemini guy for years
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
I’m hoping Karpathy will make Claude Code better, in the meantime I’m super happy seeing a small product manager like Tibo fucking crushing it on Codex
My point is that product velocity is visible in shipped workflow improvements, not prestige hires
Prestige is fickle, look at academia today
Joking aside, there are small communities pushing codex and AI to the bleeding edge of what's possible.
Here I'll give you an example. The last few updates from Boris at CC have been tweaks to the system prompt to make it use less compute, effectively making the system dumber, making it tell you to go to bed. I mean come on! Tibo has been impressing me, bc they're building the things these small communities are building.
One of the things these bleeding edge guys and girls have been working on is a /goal feature, essentially ralph loops. Codex released it as a feature the other day. I can't help but be impressed. As an ex-pm, this is product management.
Then you take a look at what the Chinese are doing on their own forums, and it just makes what Google and Anthropic are doing look outdated. OpenAI feels competitive, which I like. What's coming will not be kind to us, we adapt or we die.
I am sure there is an element of reality in it's capabilities, but there's also a significant amount of "We don't have the compute to handle this at scale", and "look look, we have the best model. It's so good that you can't even compare it to other models. That is how good we are."
The Claude maximalists that can never see any wrong in anything and the users that care about actual capability
These guys are going to be in for a rude awakening when the Chinese are steamrolling us with data centers you can see from space and better models, Amodei will tell you that himself
Adapt or die
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
They are all going to get their lunch eaten by the Chinese.
In the USA with access to most of the world's capital, they've succumbed to the temptation of "bigger, faster, harder"
Whilst the Chinese, with enough capital only, have had to think.
The Chinese models are already miles ahead on cost/inference basis and will probably pass all the USAnian companies in five years
The age of UASnian engineering dominance are coming to an end.
Let's all hope she goes quietly - not at the moment
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-...
He heard Elon say “I drive with eyes, so cars just need eyes” & shipped?
:( happy to have my impressions corrected (but I was kind of pretending it’s a 2026 scenario where you could slap Lidar, ship a Waymo, if you were just willing to spend the friggin MONEY - 2017 was too early for most any “self” driving IIRC)
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*edit - in a scenario where his refusal to skip Lidar catalyzed change
"2. an ability to apply engineering design to produce solutions that meet specified needs with consideration of public health, safety, and welfare, as well as global, cultural, social, environmental, and economic factors." "4. an ability to recognize ethical and professional responsibilities in engineering situations and make informed judgments, which must consider the impact of engineering solutions in global, economic, environmental, and societal contexts."
https://www.abet.org/accreditation/accreditation-criteria/cr...
Unfortunately, rather important courses like engineering ethics have become lumped in with mandatory DEI objectives and similar 'grievance studies' requirements, classes which many suffer through quietly, regurgitating the Correct responses while they count the minutes until they can get back to more substantive classwork. Some undergraduates may unfortunately gloss over ethics just as they gloss over lectures on privilege.
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.