[prodigycorp]

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

[resiros]

I think you are underestimating both the value of both projects (autoresearch and personal wiki) just because they are simple. I see both POCs for continuous learning / optmization on the harness layer, which in my opinion is a very interesting direction.

I think Andrej has the experience (and now ressources) to productionize this research into something very interesting.

p.s. called it

> Karpathy will help launch a new team focused on using Claude itself to accelerate pretraining research — an increasingly important frontier as AI companies race to automate parts of AI development. (https://www.axios.com/2026/05/19/anthropic-openai-karpathy-a...)

[DiscourseFan]

No, these are developed off of the assumed uses of the models (predictive autofiller) rather than their actual, cognitive and potential industrial use (developing large scale frameworks for industrial production, automating systems that normally require human monitoring), and uses that we have not yet discovered, because we have not figured out all the constraints and limitations of these models. If Karpathy was in the game like he used to be, he would be on real product. Right now he’s probably so lost by the very thing he helped create that he is stuck doing these mini projects for his own personal interest, without anyone really critically engaging with his work.

[saberience]

Those projects are a complete joke. Neither of them were even original, people have been playing around with those ideas for well over a year.

They just became "famous" because Karpathy is effectively an AI celebrity, so he could throw shit at a wall and post it on X and it would get 10k Github stars.

But seriously, people have been using the models to tweak hyperparemeters, or using LLMs to help create a second brain using markdown or json files or 100X other combinations of files, for a long time already.

[fennecbutt]

Agree. Watch people glaze him tho. Same as John Carmack who is supposedly brilliant but hasn't actually really done anything since Doom.

[charcircuit]

Just because something is not ground breaking that doesn't mean that technology path isn't valuable.

[tayo42]

It's also hard to any hard research on your own without resources. At best a few gpus can only go so far right now.

[AIorNot]

yes stop kidding yourself that he is going in as a tech leader in terms of providing technical innovation..at that stage its your persona that matters not the tech (sure I think Anthropic is going to listen to his advice..but its a transactional marketing win primarly)

his value to Anthropic is his influence..he has over 2 million followers, and value is that he is the Top influencer for AI right now, like it or not. just like Selena Gomez might be for top for women age 21-29...

Every AI nerd I know reposts his (very thoughtful posts and projects mind you) like religon

[canada_dry]

> just becomes a glorified marketer

That implies Karpathy is either dumb or desperate and he is neither of those by a long shot.

[noufalibrahim]

I don't think that's the parents implication.

Generally, when a "good" developer has a huge public presence and reputation, that's quite valuable to a company when they're competing in a tough space. Many a time, more so than the (very high) technical skill of the developer in question.

I've seen large funded companies gather good popular developers like pokemon cards and just have them go around give talks and write blog posts. It creates an aura around them which makes things like hiring, fund raising etc. much easier.

So, it's not really a statement about Karpathy himself. It's more about the company hiring him.

[newppc]

Yea, I say this as a marketing agency owner, not a developer or AI researcher, that besides Sam Altman, Dario, Demis and Elon, that Karpathy is one of the most influential I follow.

There’s a lot of value for the business world in learning AI from someone who has been at the top of their game but now is doing a general service by being a great educator and translator between the fields.

His recent Wiki approach may be simple to devs but is certainly an aha moment for the rest of the peanut gallery paying attention!

[tkgally]

His LLM-wiki framework has been very useful for me for some personal research and knowledge-building projects I've been working on recently. When I get an idea for a new project, I first give it to Claude together with LLM-wiki.md and have it spend a few sessions compiling knowledge in the wiki before beginning work on the project itself. I schedule further wiki-maintenance sessions for later, too. Over time, the wikis become especially valuable when planning major changes or additions to the projects, as they help to ground both me and Claude with knowledge specific to the project.

Here's an example wiki in a public repository for a dictionary I have been having Claude build for the past few months:

https://github.com/tkgally/je-dict-1/blob/main/planning/wiki...

[newppc]

Very cool - yea I’ve been building a glossary and knowledge base and applying the linking approach and it’s been fun.

[noufalibrahim]

Thank you. I wasn't aware of this way of doing things.

[swiftcoder]

> That implies Karpathy is either dumb or desperate

This kind of thing happens to big names in software all the time. Carmack going to Facebook is a prime example - he joined with the idea of using all those resources to build world-changing tech, and instead he ended up headlining conferences, and fighting a losing battle against the corporate types who were put in charge of Oculus.

[nine_k]

Hasn't Carmack solved a few serious engineering problems, making Oculus more or less the most advanced VR device? (The fact that an advanced VR device does not seem to be needed by the mass market is not an engineering problem.)

[gruturo]

Yes - but - ironically - he did that _before_ joining them. IIRC he literally started collaborating and helping them while being at a different company.

[StilesCrisis]

That seems surprisingly common to me. Visionary engineer has solution to problem, gets hired, solves the broad strokes in the first year, then spends N more years in meetings with exec stakeholders and worrying about schedules/hiring/financials instead of _doing the vision work_.

[swiftcoder]

yeah, and its kind of just misaligned incentives. Visionary engineer wants to solve hard tech problems, corporation wants a product with mass-market appeal. To hit mass-market appeal, corporation cost-cuts until the hard tech problems are outside the solution space...

[shuckles]

No it doesn’t? It matches his skills to the lab’s needs. Karpathy is a media personality, manager, and educator far more than he is a hands-on researcher.

[bdangubic]

he’s not a hands-in researcher just like lebron is not a basketball player but media personality :)

[shuckles]

It’s kind of useless to argue through metaphors here. There are a hundred researchers with more significant contributions to theory and practice than Karpathy. If you disagree, I’d love to see what papers or implementations you think he’s offered that pushed SOTA.

[nozzlegear]

Lebron can still dunk when he needs to!

[UncleMeat]

Andrej is a smart guy. You don't get into Stanford for grad school without that.

But he has always been known for his communication rather than his research. He got famous by putting out a (very well made) course on machine learning that was available to the public. Since graduating he hasn't exactly delivered on revolutionary new stuff at the businesses that employed him but he has continued to be extremely good at communicating thoughts about the current and future state of AI. Businesses want that and he knows that he can deliver that.

[Swizec]

> That implies Karpathy is either dumb or desperate and he is neither of those by a long shot.

No it implies that he is more valuable for being famous than the hands-on work he can produce. This is the IC endgame

[afavour]

I don’t think it does. I think it’s better phrased that he is marketing rather than a marketer. He can do whatever he wants to do, in return Anthropic gets to say “hey, this guy works with us!”

[ghaff]

Different people have different wants and needs. It's perfectly reasonable to work on some interesting projects and to be something of a figurehead.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

He already stated his motivation a few months ago in an interview with Dwarkesh - basically saying that he might join one of the big labs, for a while, to keep in touch with frontier research.

Andrej seems like a great guy, but him joining Anthropic feels a bit like a transactional relationship (rich old guy marries hot young chick). Anthropic get a "glorified marketer", and he gets a front row seat at SOTA LLM dev 2026. I don't think they hired him expecting he's going to change the direction/pace of their research.

[jimbokun]

An employment relationship is transactional??? Like the employer pays money and the employee provides labor???

Scandalous!

[HarHarVeryFunny]

Maybe poor choice of words on my part - what I meant was that this doesn't appear to be a case of AI research co. hires AI researcher to do AI research.

A regular marriage is transactional to some extent too right, but not quite the same as Anna Nicole Smith marrying a 90yr old.

As an aside, an Indian guy I used to work with once explained to me how traditional Indian arranged marriages, like his own, work, and they are HIGHLY transactional. It's not just a matter of same caste, same social status etc, but an explicit trade off. In my co-worker's case he cheerfully told me how his wife was very dark skinned, therefore considered not that attractive/desirable (to other Indians!), but her family had money and social status so it was considered a fair trade for a nice looking boy like himself!

[nozzlegear]

I don't know anything about this person, but want to point out that renown and validation is something that most (all?) humans crave. That doesn't make them dumb or desperate, it makes them normal.

[kmaitreys]

> https://gist.github.com/karpathy/442a6bf555914893e9891c11519...

Last thing I saw Karpathy talk about was this, which I find hard to believe that it came from a smart person.

[ModernMech]

I love how a ton of the replies after it are "I built exactly this with an LLM", even using his name in the repo.

[pixelsort]

Yes, that's probably his dumbest public idea to date. Given that this GPT repos and parts of autoresearch are brilliant I'm sympathetic. I think he's earned the right to exhibit mild expressions of AI psychosis at this point.

And, my objection was that he clearly had no understanding of the supply-chain risk he was worsening by advocating widespread use of Obsidian for agentic engineering tasks.

Since his announcement, Obsidian has taken proactive steps to mitigate the risks, or at least study threat model. Hopefully, they will implement proper RBAC or something before someone else with his visibility announces an even more irresponsible half-baked idea.

[blackqueeriroh]

Why is this dumb? Please educate those of us less brilliant than you!

[carterschonwald]

oh my, i see what youre saying. at this point youd hope everyone has realized that the best way to keep models more reliable is to force them to stay honest via very very string static typing as a feedback loop. bags of text with hyperlinks certainly fail that measure

[piker]

Being a singular influencer in this space, at this time, may be more valuable than a lot of successful VC-backed startups over the last few decades.

[fennecbutt]

CEOs also get paid millions and billions to do nothing. Sooooo...

"Improve yourself, no mistakes" in a loop. Woooah sooo revolutionary...

[foobiekr]

Anyone who would voluntarily work for Musk when he went obviously has things going on that aren't great.

[prodigycorp]

i mean he did publicly openly solicit interest to work at a frontier lab so he can be closer to what's going on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwSVtQ7dziU&t=2870s

[alfonsodev]

And it makes a lot of sense, doesn't?.

There are things that you can only explore and learn in those places, for obvious reasons.

I don't know his personal life goals but he's a great communicator and educator, if this decision makes him more up to date, and allows him to create even more relevant content then is something everyone will benefit. I understand the risks of being bias toward one company and not the other, but if you look at the content he created so far, he always talk principle first and specific tool later.

I think people here should give him the benefit of the doubt.

[prodigycorp]

i meant everything out of respect for andrej. it's no different from how a visiting scholar can be great marketing for an institution

[alfonsodev]

Alright, is just that your previous comments and some others sounded to me a bit too judgy, I had to re read these with a new interpretation:

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

> im also going to guess that whatever research he does ...

At first sounded like unnecessarily prejudging a person and his future efforts.

But if you say you meant everything out of respect for him, then I have to re read what you said , more as skepticism towards Anthropic than picking up on him at a personal level.

I guess what's behind is the sentiment that big companies are going to (or have already) cross ethical lines when it comes to survive and making revenue, and I can share the same concern easily. I think in this forum the majority would do.

I would just make that more explicit and separate the person from his choice, and his future work from how the company could use it, that would be a more respectful way in my view.

But is just my opinion! and I'm aware I'm might be picking on nuances that don't matter or being overly polite :D

[Barrin92]

he's not dumb or desperate compared to the average person, but it's very possible to be dumb and desperate compared to the delusional promises and outsized amounts of money in the industry. Manages to make smart people look extremely stupid every day.

[coldtea]

Greedy is enough. Neither dumb nor desperate needed for this.

[0123456789ABCDE]

> i know he's reading this now

meanwhile in the real world:

  claude --permission-mode=auto --model=opus -p '/onboard --user=karpathy'

[baq]

expectation: in the real world the CLI will be replaced by an agent prompt and to get to the shell you'll have to ask 'get me bash dammit'