Posted by dmarcos 13 hours ago
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/19/anthropic-openai-karpathy-a..., https://archive.ph/h6T3X
Source: https://www.axios.com/2026/05/19/anthropic-openai-karpathy-a...
> 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!
I couldn’t help myself but consider this mostly a very inefficient variant of hyperparameter optimization, but someone correct me if I’m wrong, I may be looking at this too pessimistic.
> Am I the only one who wasn’t particularly impressed by AutoResearch?
Many people are still deluded and think he is the same person who wrote the informal AI tutorials in plain html. He isn't, he is selling stuff now.
Sure, it can always not work out but that's no more a risk with him than any high-profile hire who doesn't really need the money and will always have other options.
Is that a serious question? He already promoted vibe coding and AI hype. Now he is literally there to promote Anthropic and its IPO price.
When he was at OpenAI it wasn't overtly commercial yet. At Tesla he had a way lower profile. Now he is the vibe coding Jesus for deluded software engineers. The impact is much larger.
?
He was literally rolled out in front of camera as Tesla's AI prodigy at multiple streamed events designed to appeal to techy consumers and dev recruitment. He's definitely been one of AI's public personas for a long time now, and his employers have regularly aided/directed/utilized him accordingly.
(I do understand that for Anthropic it's a brand boost as well, just like signing other prominent researchers, as it was with LeCun and Meta etc).
It might be Elon who went and said that and said they don’t need lidar, but as director of AI and auto vision Karpathy bears the responsibility for those features.
That I also want to know. He bailed out of Tesla right when the limitations of his "LIDAR-less cameras only self driving" system were becoming obvious, and nobody asked him about the hindsight of this obvious fuckup.
>but as director of AI and auto vision Karpathy bears the responsibility for those features.
Exactly. You lead the R&D, so it's on you. If your boss makes stupid decisions in public overriding your best judgement, the leave and go somewhere where your decisions be respected. The ML market was red hot for people like him back then so it's not like he didn't have alternatives.
Although I doubt Elon forced that idea on him, since he's the one who was confidently claiming that vision only is better since Lidar pollutes the sensor fusion data.
Did he never experienced optical illusions? I don't get it.
Elon makes it so easy to hate him as much as to admire. No comparison.
Except the good companies probably dont make you do silly stupid outdated interview practices without the tools you can actually use on the job today, right?
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!
There's a choice to be made between helpfully defeating someone's ATS and searching for more clueful employers. I'll probably be walking paper resumes into local offices next time around anyhow.
I learned speed cubing from badmefisto when I was in middle school, ~16yr ago (today my ao100 is ~15s).
I never knew it was Karpathy. What an insane knowledge drop. Thanks for sharing!
Have you considered the possibility that someone you regard as extremely intelligent is speaking from real-life experience and direct proximity when they say another person is smart?
Or perhaps your bias toward Musk make that impossible to even consider.
In hindsight, it's easy to assess that Gates was a charming moron, Jobs was an overeager egoist, and that Altman is a sociopathic liar. All of the white knights defending their boy genius narrative are contradicted by their asinine philosophies, and in Elon's case he's simply undermined by all of his broken promises, random accusations and manic paranoia.
He is both, but it’s irrelevant in this context.
From all the interviews and stuff that came out within the past few years, its pretty clear that Musks only contribution to anything is just throwing money at stuff while also scamming suppliers, governments, and so on. The dude has no technical knowledge of his own, he just lies and lies about what actually happens, and takes credit for accomplishments that aren't his.
When you hear someone who is supposedly smart talk about a dumb person like he is smart, it raises questions on whether that person that is doing the talking is actually smart.
edit: typo
But I don't think it's fair to say Elon is stupid / a bad engineer. When John Carmack speaks well of his talent, I take that seriously.
— Ram, Tron (1982)
Works where archive.ph is blocked, no CAPTCHA, no Javascript, no DDoS directed at blogger
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA23AbWR...
x=https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA23AbWR/
#tnftp -4o"|grep -o '<p>.*</p>'|tr -d '\134'" $x > 1.htm
#links 1.htm
curl -HAccept: -HUser-Agent: $x|grep -o '<p>.*</p>'|tr -d '\134' > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htm1. 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.
2. Most entry level jobs for current graduates in white collar fields. (See hiring rates for these positions)
3. Thousands of layoffs (mostly attributed to AI use, while not 100%, the Anthropic's specific marketing push has a huge influence on this - unlike OAI and other labs)
4. All low-code products/startups
5. Web agencies who did small websites for local businesses
While AI industry push is there for all of the above, Anthropic's specific marketing/PR is specifically directed towards forced adoption of AI and burning tokens, unlike from other labs.
Hmmm… maybe. I think not. It really depends on your other claims below, with which I mostly disagree.
2. Most entry level jobs for current graduates in white collar fields. (See hiring rates for these positions)
Maybe a small amount. Entry level white collar jobs have a low hiring rate for other reasons, imho.
3. Thousands of layoffs (mostly attributed to AI use, while not 100%, the Anthropic's specific marketing push has a huge influence on this - unlike OAI and other labs)
What they say and what the actual reasons are not the same, imho. Correcting for over hiring is the actual main reason.
4. All low-code products/startups
Low-code and no-code products in the hands of someone who doesn’t have a developer’s mind and/or experience usually ends up as a mess, and quickly becomes an unusable mess.
I know of exactly two people who have done successfully used AI to make a low-code/no-code product. One is just highly motivated and wicked smart. The other did a minor in CS a long time ago (works in a different field). Everyone else shows me a pile of garbage and asks me how to fix it (answer: throw it away and start from scratch).
5. Web agencies who did small websites for local businesses
As with 4 above, the only site a local business can make for themselves is one that functions as a business card… at best. Usually it looks more like a business card that a kindergartner made. They simply don’t understand what makes a website good for their business, therefore they cannot direct AI to make it for them.
There’s a lot to criticize about AI, imho, but these aren’t on the list.
So much of what you'd previously pay a "real" freelance developer or web "agency" to build is no less "garbage" than what engineers would call the average vibe-coded web app.
Claude in particular is today really surprisingly good at taking examples and a layperson's description of a website and building something that looks good and is functional.
For obvious reasons, I think many developers/engineers don't want to accept this. They'd prefer to believe that there's something special about their craft that means something produced by AI isn't good enough. But the honest will acknowledge that spaghetti code and crap pre-dated AI.
I know I can code and get better results than most people can with an LLM but I've came to realize that it doesn't matter and people just want to see results (even if they are kind of wrong).
In other words, with the website example, I've realized that even if the agency can do something 10x better, most people will choose to "buy" the AI website just because it's free or super cheap, and that makes me sad
For who?
Similar sentiment shared with other startup founders- check on x about all VCs talking about moats against big labs.
2. Sure, that's one thing.
3. Coefficient Bio is not a thing. They don't have a product. Ever. It's just Anthropic hired 10 people for a ridiculous amount of premium bonus. (Time will prove it's a bad decision, btw)
4. (snorts)
This doesn't automatically make them the great virtuous team. It just means the rest of the pack are toxic as all hell.
I am working on a short story on this topic which is set in 2100s, where most humans have internalized the concept of 'having enough' after the great conflict. But some specimen have started to show signs of this syndrome again, and neuroscientists and psychologists are grappling to understand where it originated from.
There are several. They're in China, releasing competitive open-weight models on a regular basis.
We can only blame ourselves for everything that happens as a result. For instance, the effect of US government sanctions on high-performance GPUs has been to force Chinese researchers to do more with less. It will be years before they can bring their own fabs up to speed, but they now understand that a Manhattan Project level of effort is called for, and their AI labs aren't going to drag their feet in the meantime. This is how we ended up with a 27B model that can run with the big dogs from only one generation ago.
I hope they keep releasing weights, but don't know how optimistic to be about that.
>I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.
There is no universe where this can be described as anything close to ethical.
The idea of "defend[ing] the United States and other democracies" and "defeat[ing] our autocratic adversaries" are always the stated reasons for US military action. Iraq was certainly an "autocratic adversary" and hundreds of thousands of people died from the war there. Vietnam was about "defending democracies" and resulted in millions of people dying. These are atrocities on an incomprehensible scale.
The ethical objection is very simple. War is evil, and the military is in the business of war.
Especially given the context of these press releases was right at the height of "we'll have Greenland one way or another" pronouncements.
Anthropic showed their belly same as OpenAI anyways.
Anthropic played a really well orchestrated marketing gimmick so that they would be in the headlines for a couple days bringing awareness to non-tech people on how they are supposedly the good guys. They then backpedaled all of this and are in contract with the DoD once the headlines passed.
But this obviously worked as you now believe they are the good guys
Their red lines are still in place. They are the only AI company with those red lines.
[1] https://www.obsolete.pub/p/exclusive-anthropic-is-quietly-ba... [2] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/25/tech/anthropic-safety-pol... [3] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-dials-back-ai-safety-c...
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/01/pentagon-anthropic-blacklist...
[1] https://www.techradar.com/ai-platforms-assistants/anthropic-...
This good guy ("AI Safety") versus bad guy is all marketing gimmicks. I'm old enough that it reminds me of Google "don't be evil".
What I find worse is that some people actually believe Anthropic are really the good guys.
AI safety is important. My point is: you should have zero trust in those companies to actually care about AI Safety besides the marketing and PR aspect of it. Incentives matter.
Why should I trust that your assessment is correct? Is it likely to ever be correct in the case of a doctor/mechanical engineer/athlete/economist/whatever? So why do so many people insist that an incredibly intelligent AI researcher has fallen into some obvious trap?
The only time my reality has changed is when I spend time at a computer or on my phone and even then, its a fraction of the total time. So no, it's not a "totally different reality" for me.
Like specifically what has he done?
- At Stanford, Led research on the first (to my knowledge) crop of joint image/text models. Super widely cited work.
- At Tesla, led their whole self driving effort for a while, came up with critical techniques that allowed them to make progress (e.g., the concept of "auto labelling": using a much larger NN to generate training data with which to train smaller models that could fit in the on-device compute. IIRC, Elon said they would not have been able to make progress without this insight).
I'm not sure his educative efforts for the mold of what you're looking for, but if so, the course he designed at Stanford (and availed online):for neural networks, as well as his blog posts, (most famous of which, to my knowledge, is "the unreasonable effectiveness of LSTMs"), made a huge impact on educating a generation of tinkerers and researchers.
I can guarantee you this was built-in from day #1
I'm guessing you're not a developer if you don't then automatically think of end cases like "what if car # 1 isn't in the preceding frame" ... (then you look at some relevant test data and see it was there, unlabelled ...)
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EDIT: It looks like you deleted the part of your post I quoted below. So feel free to ignore my question about it, I guess.
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Not sure what you mean by
> Shows how much you know
Do you mean that the fact that I misremembered a word on the title suggests that I know very little about Karpathy's contributions to the field of neural networks?
I was more looking for signal that him + Anthropic might yield something beyond a step-change from Opus 4.7 (disappointing so far). We have not gotten to use Mythos yet, I wonder if that will become Opus 5 or something.