He already stated his motivation a few months ago in an interview with Dwarkesh - basically saying that he might join one of the big labs, for a while, to keep in touch with frontier research.

Andrej seems like a great guy, but him joining Anthropic feels a bit like a transactional relationship (rich old guy marries hot young chick). Anthropic get a "glorified marketer", and he gets a front row seat at SOTA LLM dev 2026. I don't think they hired him expecting he's going to change the direction/pace of their research.

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jimbokun 5 hours ago | parent [-]

An employment relationship is transactional??? Like the employer pays money and the employee provides labor???

Scandalous!

	▲	HarHarVeryFunny 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe poor choice of words on my part - what I meant was that this doesn't appear to be a case of AI research co. hires AI researcher to do AI research. A regular marriage is transactional to some extent too right, but not quite the same as Anna Nicole Smith marrying a 90yr old. As an aside, an Indian guy I used to work with once explained to me how traditional Indian arranged marriages, like his own, work, and they are HIGHLY transactional. It's not just a matter of same caste, same social status etc, but an explicit trade off. In my co-worker's case he cheerfully told me how his wife was very dark skinned, therefore considered not that attractive/desirable (to other Indians!), but her family had money and social status so it was considered a fair trade for a nice looking boy like himself!