Hacker News

Specifically it looks like he's planning to extend the ideas from https://github.com/karpathy/autoresearch into a larger effort towards recursive training improvement [1]:

> 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!

[1] https://x.com/nickevanjoseph/status/2056760504949842219

This is good branding move for Anthropic. Karpathy is well respected among ML crowd.

Why do they need this when they have the next gen mythos? Surely that can manage everything?

I wonder if he had to answer a few Leetcode / Codility problems first.

Someone at Anthropic watched and lit a fire.

Good for him, his public work these last ~1-2 years has been influential for me, as I'm sure it has for others.

I even share his concern about struggling to keep pace with the rate of change lately, and agree that my working in a frontier lab or any other such environment would certainly help with that!

I have a weird background mix of analytic philosophy, linguistics/NLP, propaganda research, and long-term institutional data science/strategy work, which unfortunately does not make ATS systems especially low-friction as I try to jump industries.

So I keep busy the best I can: lately building tooling around runtime observability, intent legibility, and intervention in LLM systems.

Some small public artifacts finally going up: https://huggingface.co/spaces/anotheruserishere/Cartogemma

Eh. Worth a shot!

He is a great educator, not only for ML. He taught speedcubing under the badmefisto pseudonym.

Yes. I think Anthropic's success with claude code + cowork and the way it's shredding through white-collar work is basically cementing the thesis of Geoffrey Hinton's latest paper (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s12559-026-105...). I highly recommend reading it in full, but briefly:

1. Copernican Revolution -> We aren't the center of the universe

2. The Darwinian Revolution -> We aren't the pinnacle of life

3. The Freudian Revolution -> We aren't even in control of our own minds

4. The "Intuitive AI" Revolution -> We aren't the only form of intelligence

I think even a month ago I would've read this article and scoffed, but having used Claude Code almost exclusively at work for the last couple months it seems pretty undeniable that in-context-learning and a good enough harness is all you need to displace most "thinking" jobs that require just a bachelors. The hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into data center build-out basically hinges on this thesis, and frankly I trust the judgements of the billionaires financing these deals better than LLM-naysayers on hackernews (not to mention the non-public info they have access to). You don't need to reach superintelligence to still deeply, deeply affect society, and I think Anthropic was the first to build products that are actually good enough and, critically, hands-off enough to do just this. Every day it's clearer and clearer to me that "I was born into a poor family but am relatively intelligent and good at learning things, therefore I can find success" is exactly what will ultimately be eliminated as the outcome of this unless we get the government to step in and regulate.

I could go on and on, but the main point I'm trying to make is that you should definitely examine unease you feel about Anthropic, consider framing that unease in the context of Hinton's argument, and ask yourself what the implications may be.

Not really. I mean it’s not like they are particularly far ahead. Maybe a small lead on model performance, but nothing particularly significant. All the major players are within 6 months of each other. As soon as model improvements plateau there will be no observable difference between providers.

Name three things they destroyed?

Without Karpathy, the AI field hasn't skipped a beat, but he is certainly a great addition to any team.

its destroyed my codebases with ai slop , errors, and code maintenance nightmares going forward. i feel bad for anyone having to work on ai generated code.

Honestly, if Skynet were possible, Anthropic would probably build it first and claim they had to because OpenAI is bad.

If you look at his recent content, I think he's gotten LLM Psychosis unfortunately

I don't think Karpathy has nearly the portfolio of accomplishments. I think of him more as an educator.

> creating magic everywhere they go

Like specifically what has he done?

A viable path to becoming a billionaire or a viable path to build something that met its goal? There are several notable educational content companies that run on quite minimal budgets once they have the platform and other (mostly) capital expenditures taken care of.

How serious was Eureka labs anyway? It seemed like essentially a banner for him messing around with content creation

Half right, half overstated. Thin LLM wrappers get eaten — products whose value-add is "we hand-tuned this prompt for X." Products that change workflow primitives (state, persistence across sessions, multi-step orchestration) are a different animal.

Karpathy pausing Eureka reads more like "I miss being at the frontier and can't replicate that as a solo founder" than "my moat got eaten." Different decision.

"that's the actual news", "the bigger signal", etc. -- this has a lot of the hallmarks of AI generated text but with overt stylistic simplification layered on top (nocaps, some weird spacing)

Money ppl are on x, hence founders, hence the rest.

might want to check https://github.com/alexandru/social-publish

If you don't actually have the desire to build, lead, and manage a large organization, this is a terrible idea for technical geniuses. A guy like him will instantly raise $1 billion which means hiring dozens of people, which means tons of interviews, management, performance review, planning, board meetings, etc etc.

It's good that there are avenues today for people to make tens or hundreds of $m in salaried positions at companies so that they don't have to do that stuff to get paid their value if they don't genuinely want to.

Two years ago I’d agree, now he probably wants access to the immense capacity they have where if he were to start a lab from zero now, the ramp up to frontier pushing would require a lot more time. I don’t he needs the money as it is, and wherever he were to go would certainly make it worthwhile financially. Some people may just be cool with a couple hundred million dollars in their lifetime

> He should have done his own lab

Which raises the question: what can he do at Anthropic that he couldn't on his own?

It’s not enough to have unique ideas. You need capital, compute, people, distribution, customers… There’s huge appeal to joining a place that has all those things and lets you pursue your unique ideas without worrying about all that.

I am not entirely sure you understand how expensive it is to train these models

yes, pure engagement farmer. Marketing yourself is a big part of the biz these days. Thanks, social media

rest & vest if he makes it to IPO

5 years at Tesla is an eternity in the tech world.

And 2 years is probably pretty average for the whole tech industry.

Interesting methodology

Even if that's true, 2 years is a huge amount of time to make real impact right now. By 2 years, we could have a clear winner of the AGI/ASI race.

i wouldn't be surprised if he just becomes a glorified marketer for anthro.

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

He may not be a brilliant researcher, but he is a brilliant teacher. I am glad he is joining Anthropic so he can stay up to date with the next round of things that he will teach :)

he'd probably be a great face for developer relations or whatever Antropic calls the role

The self drive on my Tesla is damn near perfect. I haven’t driven my car in around 6 months.

Tesla self driving works. I don’t know if Karpathy deserves credit for that or not.

> He sort of left OpenAI before it really hit the inflection point

Sorry I'm out of the loop... What inflection point are you referring to?

Or they collude by hiring each others engineers as a way to create manageable competition and information sharing outside their fiduciary duty to shareholders.

I somehow felt he, along with Andrew Ng, are very few well-known AI experts that are left behind on the money side during the AI-gets-me-super-rich crazy time, unfortunately.

DevRel or whatever we call that now

Some people are good at developing the sciences. Others are good at developing commercial products.

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

I read this as a bad sign for Anthropic. Relying yet again on more hype instead of improving products.

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.

I mean, you would think that all those people he killed as the person in charge of deploying knowingly dangerously defective self-driving software for profit would have had a impact. But executives seem to just skate on killing customers to line their own pockets these days. Just "following orders" I guess.

His goal could simply be to learn SOTA architectures.

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.

Or, you could fit the exactly opposite story to the same data:

Growth is when you want to have institutional support, to be at the tip, backed by infinite money and best compute infra, and benefit disproportionally from compounding. Conversely tapering is when you're best flying under the radar, and there's plenty of value both in ideas and in hardware, as the leading players shed excess they can't support anymore, ...

Feels like the opposite.

Stuff is still happening and you need to be part of a big lab to see it. NanoGPT is fun but at some point you need that datacenter.

Anthropic looks a lot more like early Google -- not the first mover, but "lightning in a bottle" culture, talent, focus, and product direction that causes them to become a dominant, enduring figure.

OpenAI looks a lot more like early Yahoo -- earlier, quite a spectacle at first, definitely a game-changer and disruptor, but overspent, less focused, and subject to slow collapse under its own fragmentation and lack of overwhelming clarity of mission and purpose.

All that said, history rhymes but does not repeat, and trying to map present-day companies onto previous generations is an exercise in futility. The future is fundamentally unique.

Well, one big difference now is that you need to billions to become the next big player. The barriers to entry are incredibly high, if you plan on competing against the big players.

Of course, there could be some future lab or startup which completely revolutionizes the field by going for some approach that doesn't require a boatload of money to train a model, but for now, we're stuck with the LLMs and the costs they come with..

But do I leave all my money in US index funds?

OpenAI will be the Yahoo of AI. Starting off as a household name, but fades to irrelevancy as competitors take over.

Google is much better positioned long term with their TPUs and separate enormous revenue from advertising.

So we get ad flooded useless AIs?

That's a funny thing to say as time is infinite, and we're at the early stages of every single thing. Reasoning in time dynamics is useful though to be clear

If anything, sounds like Karpathy wanted a whole datacentre, and now he's got one...

I mean he is basically an influencer at this point? I guess this is a marketing play and we will be hearing more from him than ever.

That nobody does hints at the NDA structure.

they invented MCP, Skills, made these standards open so anyone could build the harness around them.

1. Best harness? It ranks the worst with Opus in terminalbench: https://www.tbench.ai/leaderboard/terminal-bench/2.0?models=...

2. Mixed for the entire bun ecosystem, especially with the Rust, Anthropic-focused rewrite

3. Good, because Anthropic's SDK was one of the worst ones to use.

4. Deal with the guy that has a shit ton of compute around wasting money because no-one uses Grok and was frequently calling Anthropic "Misanthropic".

https://i.redd.it/kp4uy1egspjg1.png

5. Glorified marketer whose probably greatest achievement in pushing AI forward was instructing on CS 231n and coining the term vibe coding.

Yeah, on a roll.

Tim Abbott the Zulip guy.

Having crappy limits, lots of down times, 4.7opus isn't all that.

This is an extremely valid opinion.

For people like him who probably already have enough money it’s probably just chasing the opportunity to work at the bedding edge of the field he loves. And maybe get to be the father of AGI.

Pressure, a lot of researchers believe LLMs will be able to self-improve. It's a good time right now to make some extra money.

I, personally, don't think there will be a better time for researchers to make so much money in a few years in any future of LLMs.

AGI around the corner. Comparatively little point educating people instead of machines

> the bet on camera-only driven system did not pay off

This is a pretty unsubstantiated claim. Tesla is now launching robotaxis at a fraction of the cost of Waymos, in part because they don't need all the Lidar.

i think his “fame” in the past few years has been creating teaching materials, projects, etc with lots of nuanced informative takes around the LLM space

I heavily weight the explosive revenue growth of Anthropic and OpenAI above speculation about what open source models may do in the future. I've heard for over 6 months that there's no moat but the revenue growth keeps proving it wrong. Opinions have to adjust to meet reality. There's some kind of moat, for now at least, that is not being appreciated in the conventional wisdom.

(If they were just burning Capex and nobody wanted to use their product or their gross margins were bad then I'd agree with you)

GLM 5.1 is almost there. These guys should be scared. The valuations these companies have is insanity.

Model diversity is really their weak point. OpenAI has embeddings, audio, image, video (RIP). Anthropic has ... Claude. It's a great model for a lot of things, but it's super risky to just have one thing you're good at (from a business standpoint).

those models are light years away from opus or sonnett right now though -- is the context problem really solvable?

Not about money, but knowledge. The frontier of the field is no longer accessible through arXiv or research papers only.

One thing is that the companies are holding on because of competitive advantage, and I think another is that AI is such a politically polarizing topic that actually being open about everything is risky for the companies, wanting to avoid controversy.

I worked for MS and Apple for 20 years and heard that opinion constantly; i.e., "People only work there for the money."

I have no idea if Andrej "sold out" but perhaps he realizes that if he wants to work on the cutting edge alongside talented people, with a seemingly endless budget, Anthropic is a good choice.

I chose my employers for the same reason; the compensation was secondary.

1000 people think it’s a cool story. (I am one of them). I like Karpathy and I like Anthropic and I’m excited to see them together.

I don't think this is true. He strikes me as a person motivated by curiosity and interesting problems.

As a OpenAI founder he already is long past the point of money being a consideration.

It's the only way he could get more tokens beyond the Max 20x plan lol.

Come on, he definitely has more money than he needs given his past employers. For someone with his creative output, he probably just enjoys having an environment to build and explore.

True.

Hopefully he gets them to opensource some models, in the same way that Google does.

Not exactly .. he was at the forefront of computer vision (CNNs, image captioning) for a while during the ImageNet era, then joined OpenAI in 2015 but left for Tesla in 2017 before they released GPT-1. During Karpathy's time at OpenAI they were still working on games. He left Tesla in 2022, briefly rejoining OpenAI, but this was after OpenAI had already released ChatGPT (GPT-3.5), so he missed the first hand experience of the whole AI=LLM explosion.

Imagine taking their word as gospel lmao.

  Andrej Karpathy - @karpathy

  Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. 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.

  May 19, 2026 · 3:05 PM UTC

I’ve never seen names be big in the industry in this way before. It used to be founders, now it’s personalities.

Agreed! OpenAI even bought TBPN [1], who many have equated to ESPN for business. I think that even if Karpathy didn't add any new ideas to Anthropic (unlikely), adding him to the team is an interesting message to give to the market

[1] https://openai.com/index/openai-acquires-tbpn/

Ooh, if there is a market for someone to be the Stephen A Smith here, I am waiting by the phone. I AM WAITING BY THE PHONE I mean.

At least with sports teams they entertain me and I can be a fan. For "X person joins Y company" I don't have a reason to care.

relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIZt9YPAPZo

Wouldn't be surprised if companies with too much "superstar" talent suffer from the same issues as sport teams usually do.

But you won't be stuck in Bristol, CT covering AI news.

"I'm taking my talents to South Market"