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.

Karpathy started this week at Anthropic, where he is working on pre-training under team lead Nick Joseph. Pre-training is responsible for the large-scale training runs that give Claude its core knowledge and capabilities, according to the company. It’s also one of the most expensive, compute-intensive phases of building a frontier model.

An Anthropic spokesperson told TechCrunch that Karpathy will start a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pre-training research.

Karpathy is one of the few researchers who can bridge the gap between LLM theory and large-scale training practice. Tapping him to build such a team is a clear sign from Anthropic that it believes AI-assisted research, rather than pure compute, is how it stays competitive with OpenAI and Google.