Karpathy加入Anthropic！從共創OpenAI到跳槽，他會帶給Claude什麼改變

Former OpenAI founder Karpathy joins Anthropic, leading Claude pre-training research. As top executives leave OpenAI, Anthropic is actively recruiting top talent, highlighting the fierce competition for AI talent.

Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic, responsible for pre-training tasks

OpenAI co-founder, former Tesla AI director, and father of Vibe Coding, Andrej Karpathy, has announced his joining Anthropic.

Anthropic revealed that he has started leading the team this week to accelerate Claude's pre-training research. "Pre-training" refers to large-scale training that endows Claude with core capabilities, and is also the most expensive and computationally intensive stage in building cutting-edge AI models.

Image source: X Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic, responsible for pre-training tasks

This significant personnel change in the AI industry indicates that, as Anthropic's valuation may surpass OpenAI's, the company's talent acquisition efforts are becoming even more intense.

One of xAI's founding members, Ross Nordeen, announced earlier this month that he joined Anthropic, on the same day Anthropic reached an agreement with Elon Musk's SpaceX to lease computing capacity from xAI.

• Related report: AI giants changing hands? Rumors suggest Anthropic may raise funds at a $8B valuation, surpassing OpenAI's valuation

Elon Musk once praised Karpathy, revealing insider details about Tesla

Karpathy left OpenAI in 2017 to become Tesla's AI director, leading the computer vision team for autonomous driving.

Musk, while serving as a director for both Tesla and OpenAI, recruited Karpathy to Tesla. This was mentioned in a lawsuit where OpenAI CEO Sam Altman won a case.

Letters submitted to the court show that Musk described Karpathy as the second-in-command in global computer vision, second only to Ilya Sutskever, another OpenAI founder and computer scientist.

Musk said at the time about the recruitment: "People at OpenAI wanted to kill him, but it was a necessary move."

Karpathy returns to AI R&D after Tesla and entrepreneurship

Karpathy was also one of the employees seconded from OpenAI to Tesla for "unpaid work," but at that time, Tesla's autonomous vehicle development progress was not as rapid as expected.

He left Tesla in 2022, and to this day, Tesla still has not sold a fully autonomous vehicle that can be ready to switch modes or drive safely during braking at any time.

After leaving Tesla, Karpathy briefly returned to OpenAI, then founded the AI education startup Eureka Labs.

Last year, Karpathy proposed the concept of Vibe Coding, which quickly became one of the most popular terms in the AI community.

Vibe Coding literally translates to "atmosphere coding," meaning that users mainly think of innovative ideas, give prompts to AI to write code assistants, and then generate methods for websites or platform systems.

• Related report: AI enables solo entrepreneurs to rise! "Vibe Coding" disrupts tradition, small teams can earn over a hundred million annually

In addition to proposing Vibe Coding, Karpathy also combined an AI coding agent with small language models, conducting 700 experiments in 2 days, reducing large model training time by 11%, a research automation method known in the industry as the Karpathy Loop.

OpenAI executives leave, Anthropic strengthens cybersecurity to compete

As IPO competition between OpenAI and Anthropic heats up, Anthropic has recruited Chris Rohlf, with 20 years of experience, to join their red team for stress testing. He has worked at Yahoo and Meta, and participated in Georgetown University’s CyberAI project.

Meanwhile, OpenAI has recently lost several senior executives, including John Schulman, who moved to Anthropic in 2024, Sutskever, and Mira Murati, CEO of Thinking Machines.

Anthropic's founding is closely related to OpenAI. The company was founded in 2021 by seven former OpenAI employees, including Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela Amodei, who currently serve as CEO and President of Anthropic, respectively.

Further reading:
Want to buy Claude stock? Anthropic: Unauthorized equity transfers are invalid; lawsuit filed against secondary market intermediaries