He moves around quite a bit. Less than 2 years on average if you take away the longest and shortest jobs. It feels like this is just a celebrity hire to help raise IPO value, and then he'll move again when the tech hits another real-world scaling wall. Expect another short stint (stunt) with Anthropic.
rest & vest if he makes it to IPO
I wonder what's his net worth - probably 100M+?
I have to imagine that Anthropic is giving him an equity grant worth $1B or more in their upcoming IPO. And having him will increase their market cap more than that, if for no other reason than that people trust him as a judge of who is winning the AI race. So it's already worth it even before he does any work.
didn't FB grant someone else $1B over 4 years or something for some AI lead role? Wouldn't be surprised if this guy is getting similar offers, which could explode even further with the stratospheric valuations of top AI companies.
He’s a founder of OpenAI —- likely a billionaire if he held on to his share
It's still quite interesting to me how a founder of a nonprofit can become a billionaire by having shares in it.
Because they later founded a for-profit to raise the capital required in the AI talent and compute race.
5 years at Tesla is an eternity in the tech world.
And 2 years is probably pretty average for the whole tech industry.
> And 2 years is probably pretty average for the whole tech industry.
maybe for a fungible CRUD engineer. I think Karpathy is in a different league and I'm certainly surprised to hear this fact. I would expect someone like him to sit within a certain lab for a long time
He's an extraordinarily bright guy. He can get a lot more done in two years than most people, and he can get up to speed with a new organization and a new task and be productive much faster than most people.
My impression with no inside knowledge, but understanding what Elon companies are like, is that he was assigned essentially an impossible task at Tesla and tried his very best, but it could not be done, and he semi-burned out. It makes sense for him to be getting back on the horse now.
The Elon approach to management as I see it is to assign what normally would be totally unreasonable goals to a small group of extremely bright people, and they work their asses off and somehow find a way. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn't. If it works and the impossible was in fact, just barely possible, you dominate the market, everyone gets rich, and the people see it as the most exciting, intense, and rewarding part of their career. If it doesn't, they get depressed, divorced, and looking for other work. The Elon magic is threading the needle closely enough that a lot of the seemingly impossible things are in fact possible with enough hard work and brainpower, but although Elon is extremely good at this, the nature of the thing is that you can't predict which side you'll wind up on fully accurately.
And in the case where a team gets overworked, there are legions more fresh and bright engineers to burn.
[dead]
That seems like the opposite. Why would someone with high market value stay in one place? 2 years is basically optimal - you vest 50%, maybe collect a promotion, do some good work and learn a lot, and then get to move on for another solid bump/ promotion and a new set of stocks.
I expect the people with low market value to be the ones sticking around labs for long periods of time, they don't have the option to move and they aren't getting poached.
It's incredibly hard to do good, novel work in 2 years for engineering. You'll likely not learn much either.
> And 2 years is probably pretty average for the whole tech industry.
Yes, and it is a problem
> maybe for a fungible CRUD engineer
And there's the cause.
We're in a meat grinder, and there is no $100M payout in sight for most of us
I mean just because OP wanted to "ignore" that he was at Tesla for 5 years, he was... still at Tesla for 5 years.
Depends on the country, I guess. In Europe, it would definitely not be the norm and I would definitely call previous employers if it was several 2 year stints.
2-3 years is pretty average tenure inside the EU tech sector for the past few years [1], but regardless I don't know what that tells us, given that nothing else about this is average. The sample size of Andrej-sized talent in an ongoing tech revolution of epic proportions is just very small.
[1] https://ravio.com/blog/employee-tenure-trends
While I absolutely confirm that everything you said is true, it’s interesting that that call would be illegal in many European countries. And in many more you would at best get a „I can confirm this person worked on this position in this timeframe“
Hmm, interesting point, I did not know that. But, aside from that, while they cannot tell you that the candidate would not be ok, I did get hints on what to look out for.
I mean, you always have to take the previous employers' statements with a grain of salt, but if they say they really employed for just that project, it's also good info.
Europe is not a monolith. Lots of short stints is not unusual in London.
At startups? Sure. Several stints at non-startups? Well, how much of that time was spent learning the domain? Is that knowledge transferrable (probably not because of non-competition clause)? Why were you not happy at the previous employer?
I am not saying any of these don't have valid answers. What I am saying is that we would prefer juniors that are commited and do the hard work when the work gets hard. And, at least where I work now, this gets recognized, and they become seniors in time.
London has not been part of Europe for a decade now. They locked themselves out in a bout of insanity
Europe and the European Union are not the same thing. The UK is definitely European.
Indeed it used to be the norm since basically everyone worth hiring was a contractor prior to the IR35 debacle.
And we have the stock market to show for it.
I would not say that this is because of this point. It's because investors in Europe are more conservative. Employees are as well, it's true, so it's strange to have someone out of the norm. It's not a red flag per se, but it's a thing to be evaluated.
Andrej Karpathy is from Europe (Slovakia).
His point of origin is immaterial to my point. I was not commenting specifically for Mr. Karpathy. My point was generic.
Europe’s labor market is sadly still mostly out of touch with how startups work. It’s stuck in the last century. I’m not sure if this is due to tradition, or due to the fact that startups are much harder to start in Europe in general, so people on both sides of the hiring process have less experience with it.
Two years is more than long enough to join a startup, build 3 things, and see that your equity is never going to be worth anything, and find a new job. This isn’t anomalous or weird.
Europe is not a monolith and I don't know why people think it is. 2 years stints are not unusual at all in London.
London is economically, politically, geographically, and culturally fairly distinct from continental Europe.
It's about equity worth nothing jn Europe as an employee. Europe is a bad place for employees to join a startup. Lots of time people are attracted with shares/stars whatever. Only to find out they get nothing or are taxed to hell. There is a reason why Europe is failing.
If you're really in Europe then I'm sure you know that calling previous employers is completely pointless, the best you'll get is "yes this person has worked here before".
And I work in games and 2-3 years at each company is pretty normal, with some exceptions people just finish a project and then move(or are let go, unfortunately). YMMV of course.
Depends, but definitely not pointless. Though, I do have the benefit of working in a small country, so chances are that I will know of the company and perchance know folks that work there. Even if not, employers will still see fit to help each other, at least if they are not direct competitors.
> I work in games and 2-3 years at each company is pretty normal, with some exceptions people just finish a project and then move(or are let go, unfortunately). YMMV of course.
Yeah, being laid off every 2-3 years is a lot different from job hopping and shows exactly why the games industry is in its own little pocket of screwed in this market. Especially with games taking 3-5+ years to be made. How do you keep institutional knowledge when you kick it all out and basically start from scratch every cycle.
-sincerely, another game dev
The folks I know who bounce that often are generally mis-hires:
- barely qualified, leaving to avoid getting PIP'ed
- overqualified/under-leveled, and moving is faster than getting promoted
I think it happens on both ends of the spectrum, the folks you described, and also the ones with a good reputation and network who get recruited into new opportunities.
yes, pure engagement farmer. Marketing yourself is a big part of the biz these days. Thanks, social media
Interesting methodology
[dead]
Even if that's true, 2 years is a huge amount of time to make real impact right now. By 2 years, we could have a clear winner of the AGI/ASI race.
This is such a disappointing reality that people believe this.
1) advancements in AI are made by large teams of brilliant people (and individuals who take outsized credit)
2) AGI is defintionless buzz word
3) advancements in AI will need significant changes in either how the model works or fundamentally new non existent datasets.
lol this is just not true sorry.
Claude code was one person's idea as a pet project and now it's singlehandedly 5x'd Anthropic's valuation. Sometimes single people matter, that's life.
I think both are true. Claude Code was one man's experimental project, but it's an application of AI, not AI itself.
Anthropic is a large company, with thousands of employees, and seems to be 100% (maybe 200%) LLM and scale pilled. All the advances from one model generation to the next are the result of dozens of experiments first at small scale then at larger scale, all competing for the same "development compute" portion of their overall "development + inference" compute resource.
In this environment, even if there are researchers who have ideas not on the "LLM + scale is all you need" path that Dario seems hell bent on, there seems to be not much chance that these ideas can compete for resources and compute with the mainstream experiments that the company believes their future depends on.
Maybe an individual developer like Sutskever, engaged purely in research rather than manning a barely turnable oil tanker, can make a difference, but at a company like Anthropic it seems way less likely. Cherny's baby is 100% aligned with Anthropic's mission of selling LLM tokens. Someone else fighting the mission, trying to pivot Anthropic in a new better direction is not likely to have such luck.
I was unaware that one persons idea invented LLMs and their coding abilities.
I strong suggest you better learn your recent history —- and how generally these things work