Andrej Karpathy Departs OpenAI

Paywall and archive doesn't work with this website. Can anyone with access share more details? Is this baseless speculation or has it been confirmed? Do we know what he plans to do going forward?

I have the paywall as well, but in the opening sentence they mention they confirmed it with a spokesperson at the company. Sounds pretty legit.

Andrej Karpathy, one of the founding members of OpenAI, has left the company, a spokesperson confirmed.

Karpathy, a prominent artificial intelligence researcher, was developing a product he has described as an AI assistant and worked closely with the company’s research chief, Bob McGrew. While ChatGPT has been a hit with consumers, OpenAI wants to launch software that can automate complex computer-based tasks, like filling out expense reports and entering them in accounting software, The Information reported last week.

Karpathy rejoined OpenAI last year after spending five years at Tesla, where he oversaw development of its Autopilot semi-automated driving software. His departure from OpenAI comes almost exactly one year since he said on X that he was returning to the company.

Karpathy couldn’t immediately be reached for comment. “Andrej is departing to pursue personal projects. We are deeply grateful for his contributions and wish him the best,” OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood said in a statement. “His responsibilities have transitioned to a senior researcher who worked closely alongside Andrej.”

Karpathy is the first high-profile departure at OpenAI since several senior staff resigned in the wake of CEO Sam Altman’s ouster by the board of OpenAI’s nonprofit parent. The staffers returned to the company alongside Altman after the board reversed its decision. Despite the drama, OpenAI’s business growth continued.

Karpathy has been a public face of OpenAI through podcasts, and he posts frequently on X. He has described large language models, the conversational AI that powers ChatGPT, as a kind of operating system because of its ability to retrieve files, write code and run programs, and understand audio, images and human commands.

This has got to be the most user hostile website I have ever seen, by quite a margin. Wow. It’s only missing the spinning roulette when you go to exit the site.

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