Andrej Karpathy, former head of artificial intelligence at Tesla and one of the founding members of OpenAI, announced on Tuesday that he has joined the Anthropic team, which strengthens the position of the company that created the Claude model in its attempt to dominate the AI race, writes Reuters.
“I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be particularly important. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to research and development,” he said in a message published on the X social network.
Karpathy, a highly influential member of the AI community, played a key role in the development of Tesla's self-driving and artificial intelligence technology before leaving Elon Musk's company in 2022.
“I remain deeply passionate about education and intend to resume my work in this field in due course,” Karpathy wrote. It announced in 2024 that it was launching an AI-integrated educational platform called Eureka Labs.
He joined Anthropic's pre-training team, responsible for the large-scale training sessions that give the Claude model its basic knowledge and capabilities, according to Anthropic. Karpathy started work this week and is part of the team of Nick Joseph, the company's head of pre-training.
Karpathy studied under renowned Stanford University AI scientist Fei-Fei Li and joined OpenAI as one of the company's first employees before moving on to Tesla.
John Schulman, another co-founder of OpenAI, joined the Anthropic team in 2024.
OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, has faced the departure of a number of executives, including former chief scientific officer Ilya Sutskever and former CTO Mira Murati, founder and CEO of artificial intelligence startup Thinking Machines.
Anthropic faces stiff competition from rival developers of next-generation AI models, such as OpenAI, in their efforts to create the most sophisticated models for cloud service providers.
