He should have done his own lab. He seems like someone capable of it and might bring some unique ideas.

If you don't actually have the desire to build, lead, and manage a large organization, this is a terrible idea for technical geniuses. A guy like him will instantly raise $1 billion which means hiring dozens of people, which means tons of interviews, management, performance review, planning, board meetings, etc etc.

It's good that there are avenues today for people to make tens or hundreds of $m in salaried positions at companies so that they don't have to do that stuff to get paid their value if they don't genuinely want to.

	▲	gdiamos 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I’m seeing founders being encouraged to run their business with AI and cut out the etc etc

▲

Aboutplants 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Two years ago I’d agree, now he probably wants access to the immense capacity they have where if he were to start a lab from zero now, the ramp up to frontier pushing would require a lot more time. I don’t he needs the money as it is, and wherever he were to go would certainly make it worthwhile financially. Some people may just be cool with a couple hundred million dollars in their lifetime

▲

slashdave an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I am not entirely sure you understand how expensive it is to train these models

▲

JumpCrisscross 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> He should have done his own lab

Which raises the question: what can he do at Anthropic that he couldn't on his own?

▲

TrackerFF 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Seems to me that you need incredible amounts of money to be competitive in the frontier model arena. I don't know how much money Karpathy has to spend, but I'd imagine that the money needed would almost certainly mean investors with deep pockets.

And then there's the uncertainty, will the AI "wars" be some winner-takes-all situation? Will the smaller labs eventually be acquired by the bigger ones, will they simply wash away if there's a crash?

I don't know. If you can land some exceptional gig at the big firms, maybe the financials are good enough to not start your own lab. Minimizing risk, and all that.

EDIT: Assuming such a startup would focus on frontier models.

	▲	JumpCrisscross 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> you need incredible amounts of money to be competitive in the frontier model arena This is my assumption. > there's the uncertainty, will the AI "wars" be some winner-takes-all situation? Will the smaller labs eventually be acquired by the bigger ones, will they simply wash away if there's a crash? He's Andrej Karpathy. He could wait to let the winner surface. Obviously better to get in with the winner earlier. But worse to get on the wrong team versus on the right team late.

▲

shuckles 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

He can be at the frontier while just having a regular job. Every other option is a lot more work.

▲

skywhopper 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Make a lot of money.

▲

UltraSane 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Access to a million GPUs?

▲

gk1 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s not enough to have unique ideas. You need capital, compute, people, distribution, customers… There’s huge appeal to joining a place that has all those things and lets you pursue your unique ideas without worrying about all that.

▲

amunozo 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm pretty sure Karpathy can have billions of capital if he wanted to.

	▲	conductr 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Mo money, mo problems. Just let the dude work, he’s not starving and he’s probably enjoying his life not completely wrapped up in the stress that running a company in this market must be.