Andrej Karpathy left OpenAI to work on personal projects

Andrej Karpathy, leading researcher at artificial intelligence (AI) firm OpenAI, once again left the company this Tuesday and made it official. OpenAI is an AI research company, which is known for its large language model chatbot ChatGPT with millions of users worldwide.

While confirming this news, Andrej wrote on social media site X the departure is not part of any “issue or drama” within OpenAI. However, he also mentioned, “My immediate plan is to work on my projects”.

Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday. First of all nothing “happened” and it’s not a result of any particular event, issue or drama (but please keep the conspiracy theories coming as they are highly entertaining :)). Actually, being at OpenAI over the last ~year has been…

— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) February 14, 2024

His website profile shows that Karpathy was a founding member of the OpenAI team and left the company to join electric vehicle maker Tesla until 2022 before rejoining OpenAI in early 2023.

At Tesla, he was a director of AI and worked on the Tesla Autopilot program including neural network and machine learning stuff.