😱 Andrej Karpathy departs OpenAI

Marko Vidrih
1 min readFeb 15, 2024

Renowned AI researcher and founding OpenAI member Andrej Karpathy just announced he is departing the company for a second time, posting on X that he plans to pursue personal projects.

The details:

  • Karpathy helped found OpenAI in 2016 before serving as Tesla’s Senior Director of AI for five years, rejoining Sam Altman and co. in 2023.
  • The departure follows OpenAI’s drama with Altman and the board, which has since relegated fellow co-founder Ilya Sutskever to an unclear role in the company.
  • Karpathy emphasized that no drama or event led to the departure and that he was simply pursuing personal projects (including his famous AI lectures on YouTube).

Why it matters: Between the mystery surrounding Ilya Sutskever and now Karpathy’s departure, something seems fishy between the science and business arms of OpenAI. All eyes now turn to where Karpathy heads next — with likely no shortage of suitors for one of the world’s top AI minds.

--

--

Marko Vidrih

Most writers waste tremendous words to say nothing. I’m not one of them.