> 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.
It is the ultimate manifestation of test-time scaling. I think karpathy just popularised it.
> Am I the only one who wasn’t particularly impressed by AutoResearch?
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.
Sure, it can always not work out but that's no more a risk with him than any high-profile hire who doesn't really need the money and will always have other options.
Is that a serious question? He already promoted vibe coding and AI hype. Now he is literally there to promote Anthropic and its IPO price.
When he was at OpenAI it wasn't overtly commercial yet. At Tesla he had a way lower profile. Now he is the vibe coding Jesus for deluded software engineers. The impact is much larger.
?
He was literally rolled out in front of camera as Tesla's AI prodigy at multiple streamed events designed to appeal to techy consumers and dev recruitment. He's definitely been one of AI's public personas for a long time now, and his employers have regularly aided/directed/utilized him accordingly.
(I do understand that for Anthropic it's a brand boost as well, just like signing other prominent researchers, as it was with LeCun and Meta etc).
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.
That I also want to know. He bailed out of Tesla right when the limitations of his "LIDAR-less cameras only self driving" system were becoming obvious, and nobody asked him about the hindsight of this obvious fuckup.
>but as director of AI and auto vision Karpathy bears the responsibility for those features.
Exactly. You lead the R&D, so it's on you. If your boss makes stupid decisions in public overriding your best judgement, the leave and go somewhere where your decisions be respected. The ML market was red hot for people like him back then so it's not like he didn't have alternatives.
Although I doubt Elon forced that idea on him, since he's the one who was confidently claiming that vision only is better since Lidar pollutes the sensor fusion data.
Did he never experienced optical illusions? I don't get it.
Elon makes it so easy to hate him as much as to admire. No comparison.