alt Hacker NewsI’ve joined Anthropic
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Funny. He foreshadowed this in a recent interview. Saying that he may fall out of touch with evolving approaches and if any of the frontier labs would have him, he’d be interested.
He’s a great educator and seems like a genuinely nice guy, at least on interviews. I hope he continues with his teaching career on the side, although the crazy amount of NDAs he probably had to sign may make that effort a bit difficult.
“Master Control Program’s been snapping up all us programs who believe. If he thinks you’re useful, he takes over all your functions so he gets bigger.”
— Ram, Tron (1982)
Anyone else fearing Anthropic more and more each day? Not from a perspective that they are doing so well, but rather that it's like an industry tornado, sucking up and destroying everything in it's path.
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firefox ./1.htmKarpathy is talented and to me he always seemed like someone who would be against building something like skynet. Anthropic is lucky to have him.
Karpathy's career arc feels similar to Jim Keller's; a butterfly flitting from one flower to another, gathering experiences and creating magic everywhere they go.
Selfishly, I hope this doesn't reduce to 0 the amount of time he spends doing educational content, which seems like a particular strength of his. I presume this means Eureka Labs is not releasing any product or course.
Good for him. His learning materials are unmatched, but I don’t think there was a viable path with his educational company.
the glorified marketer framing in this thread is missing the bigger signal. karpathy publicly pausing eureka labs to join anthropic is an ai founder of his caliber effectively conceding that verticals get eaten by frontier upgrades.for everyone here building on top of foundation, that's the actual news
I wonder what will happen with EurekaLabs now. I checked their X account, but the posts are now restricted. However, the background picture... that old AI-generated image feels surprisingly cringe (https://x.com/EurekaLabsAI/header_photo), incredible how much GenAI has improved since that image was created.
He should have done his own lab. He seems like someone capable of it and might bring some unique ideas.
Sir, please make it easy to break the twitter/x moat. Why don't we have an app that just posts to all the socials like bluesky/mastodon/threads etc
He moves around quite a bit. Less than 2 years on average if you take away the longest and shortest jobs. It feels like this is just a celebrity hire to help raise IPO value, and then he'll move again when the tech hits another real-world scaling wall. Expect another short stint (stunt) with Anthropic.
Karpathy is probably one of the biggest names in AI, I do wonder where he fits now. He's sort of bounced around Tesla back to OpenAI back to independent. He sort of left OpenAI before it really hit the inflection point, and he was at Tesla for a long time and they didn't really deliver what they wanted on the AI side. Now he's bounced around a few places. I understand that the leaders in this market play this silly game of trying to buy up the names like trading cards but I wonder what this turns into.
interesting signal about where AI is...
It actually feels like a signal that it is in a tapering phase.
As in, if it was in a growth phase a freeform, solo - collab with who you want, would be more beneficial. But in a tapering phase you'd want structure and to be in the private formal meetings.
just an idea
He is citing R&D? I have always been under the impression that he is an image recognition etc. expert rather than an LLM expert.
So, does Anthropic pivot to military tech or pretend to do so before the IPO?
Or is this simply a deal where he uses his formidable influencer skills for Anthropic and gets to cash in on the IPO?
We are in the early stages of AI. Anthropic is Altavista and OpenAI is AskJeeves or something. 10-20 years from now the scene will be unrecognizable and all of this will be inconsequential but at the same time it is the fondation on which tomorrow is built.
Wondering what the plan is to steward Eureka Labs, LLM101n, and whatever else was being cooked up. As a fellow educator, was very much looking forward to seeing how this would have evolved things.
Karpathy is so valuable as an educator to the whole world, and I wish he continue to communicate with us after joining Anthropic. Just concepts like "Software 2.0" and "Vibe Cording" are priceless!
I wonder if the timing of this, coming so soon after the Musk/Anthropic data center deal is just coincidence or not?
From Karpathy's various interviews I get the impression that he wants to leave the door open to working for Musk again at some point, perhaps on TeslaBot.
With Musk for now regarding Anthropic as a partner (or at least an enemy of his enemy), that seems to mean that Karpathy joining them is less likely to anger Musk than might otherwise have been the case. Who knows, maybe Karpathy was involved in brokering this data center deal?
Karpathy is a terrific communicator and populariser of the LLM landscape, and I do hope this isn't going to mean his work in that regard now gets dropped, or dropped into a private Anthropic-only void.
Anyone want to comment on what it's like to work for Anthropic (as an ordinary software/AI engineer, not as Karpathy)?
Compare and contrast with working at OpenAI, Google, etc.?
Looks like they sprinkled their ipo money on him.
Truly makes me positive about the future. Thanks Andrej
Anthropic is on a roll:
- best harness overall (well maybe until like a month ago when gpt5.5 and codex came out)
- acquires bun
- acquires stainless for SDKs
- deal with Elon for compute
- karpathy
what else did I miss?
What's your guess, how much stock / cash he got?
(I also assume they gave him a ton of independence in R&D)
Congrats Andrej. Let me know if you are looking for someone to take over Eureka Labs. We were in the same WoW classic guild. domrdy on x. We can duel for it :). Also, I need $10M if any VCs are reading this.
I will never get why anybody wants to work for FAGMAN. It's depressing how many talents put money above integrity.
You don't need to live in the bay area, most civilized places on earth let you live a comfortable life with a 10th of the salary, plus you are not selling your soul.
We are doing interesting R&D in other fields too, in places you would never believe.
Andrej has decided to become a billionaire. Anthropic keeps preparing for the IPO. I wish they IPO soon, let everyone see how the earnings look like.
The big question is... Why now? What happened to Eureka Labs?
Maybe the IPO potential was just too great to ignore and maybe AGI (A Giant IPO) is around the corner.
Interesting if his educational startup turned out to be less perspective at least with the current gen of llms.
Anyone have any stats on just what the headcount is at Anthropic and OpenAI these days?
I have been impressed by some of his work, especially on the vulgarisation and simplification. Excellent communicator and engineer. But I am a bit more skeptical about his taste and vision.
Leaving OpenAI to work for Elon Musk was a poor move, and AFAIK his work on CV at Tesla did not bring anything groundbreaking, unfortunately probably the opposite (the bet on camera-only driven system did not pay off) and his talks about the approach would indicate that his whole idea to make it work was nothing more than hill-climbing.
Also, his over-reaction to the whole Claw thing was a bit ridiculous, in my opinion.
I don't see him as a Scientist in the field, but more as an efficient tinkerer.
Andrej: Guys, thank you for the interest but I'm really focused on this education thing rn
Anthropic: Okay, let's add two zeroes
Andrej: I am very excited to join Anthropic!
(I do not blame him, I think this is reasonable, I find the whole money-falling-from-the-sky thing amusing :-)
Great person and great company
I hope he still gets to do some educative stuff on the side too
I can't help but feel like someone with Karpathy's experience and financial resources would start their own company if they had real creativity and vision.
good name recognition for Anthropic mega IPO. everything Anthropic does now is all gear toward its IPO from buying Bun, Stainless, getting big name AI guy to join...etc.
Way too late.
Sudevo7x
Sudev ray
Congrats to Karpathy. I wonder whether this is the right time to join Anthropic. Looks like it from the outside.
But - unpopular opinion - I believe Anthropic is one open-source model away (that can code well) from a massive revenue/stock crash. We're already seeing Claude's cost escalate to astronomical levels. Most coding work is medium difficulty in the grand scheme of things. So the future is an open source model small enough to fit in your local 16GB VRAM, giving you a Claude Code like experience for zero token cost. That's going to wipe out most of Anthropic's current revenue base. It does have several cool initiatives in the pipeline, but bad things happen once your bread and butter is threatened (just ask OpenAI).
Bravo Andrej
Great communicator. It’s sad that he had joined a closed llm org. I would have expected him to join forces with someone else releasing open-source models rivaling chinese model landscape. Capital always accumulates to the capital holder in capitalism :)
I would like to announce I've retired. The tech industries are screwed and the future is paper.
Karpathy will start this week on Anthropic's pre-training team, which is responsible for the massive training runs that give Claude its core knowledge and capabilities, according to Anthropic.
Source: https://www.axios.com/2026/05/19/anthropic-openai-karpathy-a...