22 ms·
Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday
- iandanforth 3y ago(again)
- Dr_Birdbrain 3y agoTo dedicate himself fully to his YouTube channel? I am looking forward! His content is amazing
- mark_l_watson 3y agoI am also. About 8 years ago, the Python miniatures he published for recurrent networks like char-rnn, etc. we’re so helpful for learning.
- wodenokoto 3y agoI imagine doing so is leaving millions on the table. I’m sure he is well off and can retire early, but even so, millions are a lot of money.
- Dr_Birdbrain 3y agoPretty sure he’s leaving BILLIONS on the table :)
- islewis 3y agoGiven Karpathy's draw towards teaching/educational content, I've wondered where he falls on the spectrum between Sam Altman's interpretation of "Open" in OpenAI, and someone on the opposite end (like Musk). I'd imagine if one was fully onboard with the AI/LLM commercialization train, there's no better spot than OpenAI right now.
- yareal 3y ago[dead]
- jph00 3y agoI think he's actually more towards the end of "actually open", which is not a place either Elon nor Sam are at. Grok and OpenAI don't openly publish or freely release much of their work. Andrej however has released a lot of his work for free ever since he was a PhD student.
- supafastcoder 3y agoThat’s why I suspect he’ll be joining Meta next.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- stygiansonic 3y agoIt seems like he (re)joined OpenAI almost exactly 1 year ago: https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1623476659369443328 https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1623476659369443328
- aubanel 3y agoNew theory: Karpathy was short on money, so he waited exactly 1 year to vest 25% of his options.
- Imnimo 3y agoEvery time Karpathy quits his job, the field takes a leap forward because he makes some fantastic educational resource in his free time.
- skybrian 3y agoExamples? (I'm not that familiar with field.)
- joss82 3y agoNeural Networks: from zero to hero https://karpathy.ai/zero-to-hero.html https://karpathy.ai/zero-to-hero.html
- Imnimo 3y agoThe most recent is this, which I believe was made after he left Tesla: https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT And it's accompanying video series: https://karpathy.ai/zero-to-hero.html https://karpathy.ai/zero-to-hero.html Another example (although I honestly don't remember if he made this one between jobs) is: https://github.com/karpathy/micrograd https://github.com/karpathy/micrograd
- weinzierl 3y agoAndrej Karpathy is badmephisto, a name you might have heard of if you're into cubing. http://badmephisto.com/ http://badmephisto.com/
- cbracketdash 3y agoThis blew my mind as well!! I never thought one of my favorite programmers would share a similar hobby haha
- namanyayg 3y agoYou just blew my mind, I used to hang around this site a lot ~10 years ago and never would have made the connection
- 3y ago
- utopcell 3y agoWhere is he going ?
- mgreg 3y agoThis is quite the loss for OpenAI. And no one seems to have heard what Ilya Sutskever's status is at OpenAI as well.
- al_borland 3y agoIf I was Sam Altman, Ilya would be on a short leash. I’m actually amazed he wasn’t booted already. He might be talented, but if he can’t be trusted, he needs to go.
- jesterson 3y agoThat’s why you are not Altman by huge margin ( and i am not a fan of latter). Building business requires latticework of talented people doing job properly. And building a system of checks and controls for less trusted people.
- cubefox 3y ago> He might be talented, but if he can’t be trusted, he needs to go. Ironically that may be exactly what Sutskever thought about Altman.
- 37urjdjru 3y agoFrankly I consider every moment of silence from Ilya a reason to keep my expectations above the floor and I imagine a lot of people feel the same with how drunk on ai doomerism and gatekeeping Ilya was. The only downside to the silence is it gives him time to try and shake off the association between his name and that circus with the board.
- jakobov 3y agoVested his rsu and left
- rvz 3y agoExactly. That is the real reason.
- nextworddev 3y agoOnly 1/4th tho?
- choppaface 3y agoAnd got very bored and unhappy with big company issues. And has the perspective from his time at Tesla to know how things only get worse for creativity at that stage.
- jdd33 3y agoIts not a good thing if true. Tech and creative folk have to find ways to stick around or the financial folk fill the leadership and decision making space.
- steveBK123 3y agoIt's a hard thing to manage. Tech orgs of ~20 people are just more fun than tech orgs of 200 people, which are more fun that tech orgs of 20,000 people which.. you get the picture. You can create and encourage small teams, but then they need to coordinate somehow. Coordination & communication overhead grows exponentially. Then you get all the "no silos" guys and then its all over..
- jumpCastle 3y agoRsu exist before ipo?
- fbdab103 3y agoPresumably he was already set for life from his Tesla gig, no?
- option 3y agoWhat about Ilya Sutskever? Wouldn't it be cool if Andrej and Ilya start truly open AI company.
- krick 3y agoFunded by what?
- option 3y agoinvestors will line up to fund them. I'd be happy to chip in in "friends and family" round too :)
- jprd 3y agoInvestors will line-up to fund a lack of return on their investment? I'd absolutely donate, but that's not what investors want for their money, unfortunately :(
- p1esk 3y agoThese two individuals can probably raise a billion dollars within a month if they wanted to start their own AI company.
- option 3y agoOn a 10B valuation )
- gdiamos 3y agoThat would be strong terms, but then they would need to find a way to spend $1B. Here's a proposal. Send $500M to NVIDIA for GPUs. Send $100M to AMD to balance the odds. Spend $100M to build a new chip as a hail mary. Spend the rest on $10M comp packages. How close did I get?
- sidcool 3y agoI think he'll join x.ai or Tesla in 6 months.
- throwtroawat 3y agoKarpathy is a great instructor, but has he has any meaningful impact in industry? It seems from the outside like he locked Tesla into a losing, NN-only direction for autonomous driving. (I don’t know what he did at openai.)
- thejazzman 3y agoTesla is only now launching their NN-only FSD model?..
- erikpukinskis 3y agoWhat makes you say it’s a losing direction?
- throwtroawat 3y agoA popular take in autonomous driving is the thing preventing Tesla from breaking beyond level two autonomous driving is its aversion to lidar, which is a direct result of its nn preference. (Eg Mercedes has achieved level 3 already).
- trhway 3y agoAbsense of lidar is just a symptom. Tesla only recently started to work with 3d model (which they get from cameras like one can get it from lidar) It just that the people who use lidar usually work with 3d model from the beginning.
- threeseed 3y ago> which they get from cameras like one can get it from lidar LiDAR directly measures the distance to objects. What Tesla is doing is inferring it from two cameras. There has been plenty of research to date [1] that LiDAR + Vision is significantly better than Vision Only especially under edge case conditions e.g. night, inclement weather when determining object bounding boxes. [1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/2093/1/012032/pdf https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/2093/1/...
- skepticATX 3y agoFrankly, OpenAI seems to be losing its luster, and fast. Plugins were a failure. GPTs are a little better, but I still don't see the product market fit. GPT-4 is still king, but not by that much any more. It's not even clear that they're doing great research, because they don't publish. GPT-5 has to be incredibly good at this point, and I'm not sure that it will be.
- rey0927 3y agountil you get new architectures it's all gonna be big datasets and 7 trillions
- 15457345234 3y ago> Frankly, OpenAI seems to be losing its luster, and fast. Good. I have no idea what's really going on inside that company but the way the staff were acting on twitter when Altman got the push was genuinely scary, major red flags, bad vibes, you name it, it reeked of it.
- rendall 3y agoWhat do you mean? How were they acting? I was surprised and touched by their loyalty, but maybe I missed something you noticed.
- Sharlin 3y agoIt's not clear to me how many of the undersigned did so under some degree of duress. Apparently there was a lot of pressure from the senior employees (those who had the most $$$ to lose) to sign.
- earthnail 3y agoWell, to be fair, the board just tried to evaporate a lot of $$$ from most employees. Any unionising effort consists of employees convincing other employees to join them. Some people will care more about the union's goals than others, and you can be certain that those who care more will pester those that care less to join their cause. What happened at OpenAI was not a union effort, but I believe the comparison is excellent to understand normal dynamics of employee-based efforts.
- dontreact 3y agoUnpopular opinion… but IMO almost all of Karpathy’s fame an influence come from being an incredible educator and communicator. Relative to his level of fame, his actual level of contribution as far as pushing forward AI, I’m not so sure about. I deeply appreciate his educational content and I’m glad that it has led to a way for him to gain influence and sustain a career. Hopefully he’s rich enough from that that he can focus 100% on educational stuff!
- georgehill 3y ago> Relative to his level of fame, his actual level of contribution as far as pushing forward AI, I’m not so sure about. Are you sure about your perspective? https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=l8WuQJgAAAAJ&citation_for_view=l8WuQJgAAAAJ:UeHWp8X0CEIC https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...
- the_arun 3y agoMay be this is what you wanted to share? https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=l8WuQJgAAAAJ&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=l8WuQJgAAAAJ&hl=en
- iaseiadit 3y agoImageNet was very influential, but this just shows he was eighth author on a twelve author paper from almost a decade ago. Is there better evidence of sustained contributions to the field?
- laborcontract 3y agoHm, well, I see on his resume that he was a founder of OpenAI, recruited to be Tesla's head of AI, went back to OpenAI, and also has the most viewed educational videos in this space. So, he has made theoretical contributions to the space, contributions to prominent private organizations in the space, and broadly educated others about the space. What more are you looking for?
- nojvek 3y agoAndrej inspires millions. He’s the Taylor Swift of AI/NNs. I really hope he’s next gig is at an actually Open AI company.
- g42gregory 3y ago[flagged]
- theshackleford 3y agoIt was a perfectly apt comparison and it certainly helps as I didnt know the guy from a bar of soap.
- squigz 3y ago"Some singer" being one of the most popular musicians in the world?
- spiderice 3y agoWould you cringe if he’d said “the Michael Jordan of AI”? Perhaps you cringing says more about you?
- tayo42 3y agoI think there is already a micheal jordan of ai though. so maybe hah
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- g42gregory 3y agoMichael Jordan of AI would be a great comparison. He is a great role model, worked extremely hard and he has no peers in his field. There is only one Michael Jordan, Pele, Wayne Gretzky in their respective fields. Also, I never saw him chugging beer in public, at the game, on live TV.
- g42gregory 3y ago
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago"I told them Xerox has got to get itself together, because there's no way a big company can take advantage of things moving this fast. People will get frustrated and start their own companies." —Carver Mead, 1979 (employee at Xerox PARC), discussing why Xerox needed to focus more on adopting integrated circuits into the computers they had already developed, instead of continuing to just make increasingly-obsolete copiers.
- zindlerb 3y agoI don't think that is an apt metaphor. Imo Openai is Apple and Google is Parc. Google experiencing a similar issue to parc where they invented transformers but have been unable to capture the value so far due to being focused on ads revenue.
- ProllyInfamous 3y agoGreat nuanced distinction. ---- "Xerox's top executives were for the most part salesmen of copy machines. From these leased behemoths the revenue stream was as tangible as the `click` of the meters counting off copies, for which the customer paid Xerox so many cents per page (and from which Xerox paid its salespersons their commissions). Noticing their eyes narrow [at R&D's attempts at asking to market their computer, one] could almost hear them thinking: 'If there is no paper to be copied, where's the `click`?' In other words: 'How will I get paid?' " —Michael Hiltzik's "Dealers of Lightning" (p272)
- osigurdson 3y agoIt seems odd that Xerox bothered with the research lab at all then. Why not only research how to make copier's cheaper and more compelling if company culture is Mad Men, copier edition?
- danielscrubs 3y agoAlways the same story, some boss wants to get noticed ask underlings to make something cool. Underlings make something cool, bosses boss get scared his position will be taken, orders a shutdown of it and to focus on what matters.
- bbor 3y agoI'm judging from his pinned tweet, "The hottest new programming language is English", that "those of you who know me know what I'm working on ;)" message at the end of this seems like a nod to developer tools of some kind. Which would track for a tech visionary, a hacker can't resist making himself better tools I guess. Anybody have better info than my idle guess?
- next_xibalba 3y agoHe has speculated a few times about an LLM based OS. That’d be way cool.
- lukan 3y agoHonestly? Sounds like a nightmare. I mean, some LLM integrated into a OS, ok, might make sense, but the OS based on LLM is not something I would want with the current state of the art.
- throwaway4aday 3y agoFeatures like function calling are moving in that direction. Microsoft also seems to have plans to deeply integrate LLMs into its OS and if they do a good job it could become a primary way to interact with its features and programs. Considering the progress made on image generation models I could image a special purpose model that is specifically trained on operating APIs and producing good results. The big hurdle would be building the APIs that don't exist for the tools that people like to use. I'm sure there are interesting ways you could think of generating labeled data for actions in various programs.
- jjtheblunt 3y agoWhy?
- llamaLord 3y agoNon-deterministic outputs... For one (rather important) thing.
- Buttons840 3y agoI thought he left a prominent position awhile ago, but I guess that was Tesla. Best wishes to him, and my thanks for his educational efforts.
- gnabgib 3y agoRelated: "Andrej Karpathy Departs OpenAI"[0] (159 points, 2 hours ago, 71 comments) [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39365288 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39365288
- dang 3y agoWe'll merge those comments hither since that article is hardwalled. One moment please.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lyapunova 3y agoLet me say, he's a great teacher! I took a CV class with him. He should teach more, and take it seriously. Being a popular AI influencer is not necessarily correlated with being a good researcher though. And I would argue there is a strong indication that it is negatively correlated with being a good business leader / founder. Here's to hoping he chills out and goes back to the sorely needed lost art of explaining complicated things in elegant ways, and doesn't stray too far back into wasting time with all the top sheisters of the valley. Edit: the more I think about it, the more I realize that it probably screws with a person to have their tweets get b-lined to the front page of hackernews. It makes you a target for offers and opportunities because of your name/influence, but not necessarily because of your underlying "best fit"
- KerrAvon 3y agob-lined?
- squigz 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee_line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee_line
- bobthepanda 3y agoSometimes I wish as a profession we valued teaching more. I would love to teach, but not do research, and make a living.
- passion__desire 3y agoBecome the next 3blue1brown. He has inspired many. Here's a gem of educator. Check out his other videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhYqflvJMXc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhYqflvJMXc
- eurekin 3y agoNot only inspired, but probably also did a soothing therapy with his voice and delivery pace. :) Strikes a balance between sounding engaging and soothing at the same time.
- renewiltord 3y agoNice. 1 year cliff bounce. LOL
- rvz 3y agoLooking at the thread, it is quite amusing to see some founders hopelessly begging Karpathy to work at their tiny startup to realize that they can't afford him as he is exceptionally brilliant in the AI industry. If OpenAI, Tesla and Google cannot retain him, then probably nobody can. Probably he'll be doing YouTube videos all day long.
- PheonixPharts 3y agoI think money is the least of the reasons why those founders wouldn't attract him. To attract someone at Karpathy's level you would need a project that is both wildly challenging (and yet not the typical startup "challenging" because it's a poorly thought out idea) and requires the kind of resources (compute, data, human brains in vats, etc) that would make your place look far more interesting than OpenAI. But, hardest of all, you would need startup founders that could tame their egos enough to let someone like Karpathy shine. I haven't talked to a Bay area startup founder in a while who wouldn't completely squander that kind of talent by attempting to force their own half-baked ideas on him, and then try to force him out months later when he couldn't ship those poorly thought out products citing lack of "leadership".
- stephenw310 3y agoKarpathy quits his job to become a full-time AI Youtuber. I don't blame him lol.
- nutanc 3y agoHe quit to build a blogging platform. https://x.com/karpathy/status/1751350002281300461?s=20 https://x.com/karpathy/status/1751350002281300461?s=20
- m3kw9 3y agoLikely as a side thing
- m3kw9 3y agoIs this a bad sign from OpenAI because he knows future products and company direction? Knowing his past from Tesla he seem to like to do world changing things..
- eclectic29 3y agoPlease excuse me for asking this. I know Andrej is an excellent instructor. I've watched his videos. But what has been his contribution to the industry (besides teaching of course)?
- jesterson 3y agoReal questions here :)
- sva_ 3y agoSounds like he wants to focus on teaching.
- peacebreaker2k 3y agodoes that mean she is pregnant? boy? girl?
- peacebreaker2k 3y ago[dead]
- peacebreaker2k 3y ago(and congrats!)
- dang 3y agoI don't understand what you were posting in this thread but can you please stop posting unsubstantive comments? You've been doing it repeatedly, and it's not what this site is for (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). I actually banned your account for a moment but then double-checked and saw that you have occasionally posted good things, such as: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36730089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36730089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33939300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33939300 ... so I unbanned you. But if you'd please stick to high-quality posts in the future, we'd appreciate it!
- ragebol 3y agoIn his free time, I hope he writes some more fiction, I really liked https://karpathy.github.io/2015/11/14/ai/ https://karpathy.github.io/2015/11/14/ai/
- mijoharas 3y agoI strongly agree. It was a great short story! Would love to see it fleshed out sometime.
- quickthrower2 3y agoDamn he’d be pretty good at a kids party with the story telling and cubing and yet he can teach and do! Has he climbed Everest yet?
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y agoTop job quitting performance
- zingelshuher 3y agoOMG, what do we do now!? But seriously, right now with full attention to LLMs, and many brains, there is no single key person. The question 'who said it first' isn't that important for the progress. With experts leaving OpenAI will gradually loose it's leadership. Others will catch up. Which is good in general, no one should have monopoly on AI. I wish it was that easy with hardware too...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- d--b 3y ago> My immediate plan is to work on my personal projects and see what happens. Those of you who’ve followed me for a while may have a sense for what that might look like Does anyone here know?
- manojlds 3y agoHis profile previously said building JARVIS @ OpenAI
- iamsaitam 3y agoMaybe he left because he finished building it.
- nuz 3y agoI imagine he's talking about his youtube series (look forward to it!)
- abi 3y agoHe's also into open source models /r/localllama
- wrsh07 3y agoHe was building small, efficient versions of gpt 3 in a video series You can check his GitHub: https://github.com/karpathy https://github.com/karpathy
- RivieraKid 3y agoInteresting that he didn't say why he left. He says "my immediate plan is..." meaning that he has no specific long-term plans or doesn't want to talk about them.
- jesterson 3y agoYou don’t expect people at certain levels splurging out their plans to populace, do you?
- RivieraKid 3y agoYes.
- ctime 3y agoI bet $1000 in iTunes gift cards (so I can pay off IRS debt collectors) that he will end up at Apple and lead one of the LLM/AI initiatives.