Founding OpenAI Member Andrej Karpathy Leaves Company

Andrej Karpathy, a leading researcher in the AI community and a founding member of OpenAI, left the company on Monday, as first reported by The Information. Karpathy later confirmed his departure.

“Yes, I left OpenAI yesterday,” Karpathy said in a tweet Tuesday. “First of all nothing ‘happened’ and it’s not a result of any particular event, issue or drama,” said the researcher. “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.”

Karpathy is leaving OpenAI roughly one year after he rejoined the company in Feb. 2023. While Karpathy did not provide a reason for his sudden departure, he is the second prominent researcher to exit OpenAI’s leadership in recent months, following OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever’s unexplained demotion. Both of the leadership changes occurred in the three months since OpenAI’s researcher-filled board mysteriously fired CEO Sam Altman.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.

Karpathy served as Tesla’s Director of AI at Tesla from 2017 to 2022, but at the time, noted he’d love to come back to Telsa for an “act two” one day, on Lex Fridman’s podcast in October 2022. He later said Tesla’s Optimus robot would be a premier product to develop AGI on because it interacts in the real world – not just a piece of software interacting with the internet.

The leading researcher originally joined OpenAI to do more technical work building AGI with Sam Altman’s team. However, the OpenAI Karpathy is leaving is very different from the company he joined a year ago. When Sam Altman returned to OpenAI’s helm, the company’s board was replaced with infamous financiers.

OpenAI is losing one of the most respected and influential minds in artificial intelligence. Not only has Karpathy led OpenAI and Tesla in creating the world’s most advanced AI systems, worked under the “godmother of AI” Fei-Fei Li at Stanford, but he also teaches basic concepts on large language models with his YouTube channel.

Karpathy expressed nothing but love and gratitude for his experience at OpenAI, however, it’s fairly obvious that something is going on with the researchers at the company. OpenAI attracted talent from across the AI community for many years. Now with Sutskever’s unclear status and Karpathy’s departure, it seems the research-focused company may be changing course.