source: techcrunch ai: openai co-founder andrej karpathy joins anthropic’s pre-training team
level: technical
andrej karpathy, a co-founder of openai and former ai lead at tesla, has joined anthropic. he announced the move on x, saying the next few years at the frontier of large language models will be especially formative. karpathy started this week on the pre-training team under nick joseph. pre-training is the large-scale training phase that gives claude its core knowledge and is one of the most compute-intensive parts of building frontier models.
an anthropic spokesperson said karpathy will start a team focused on using claude to accelerate pre-training research. this signals that anthropic sees ai-assisted research as a way to stay competitive with openai and google, rather than relying only on more compute. karpathy is known for bridging the gap between llm theory and large-scale training practice. he previously worked on deep learning and computer vision at openai, led tesla's full self-driving program, and later returned to openai before leaving in 2024 to start eureka labs, an education startup.
karpathy said he remains passionate about education and plans to resume that work later. he has taught online courses and posts lectures on youtube. separately, anthropic hired chris rohlf for its frontier red team, which stress-tests advanced ai models against severe threats. rohlf has over 20 years of cybersecurity experience, including roles at yahoo and meta.
why it matters: karpathy's move could shift how frontier ai models are developed by emphasizing ai-assisted research over pure compute scaling.
source: techcrunch ai: openai co-founder andrej karpathy joins anthropic’s pre-training team