©Reuters. FILE PHOTO: The OpenAI logo is seen in this illustration taken February 3, 2023. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
(Reuters) – Andrej Karpathy, an artificial intelligence researcher and a founding member of OpenAI, said in a post on social media platform X that he had left the Microsoft-backed company on Monday.
The news marks a significant departure from OpenAI, one of the top labs competing to develop increasingly capable artificial intelligence.
“My immediate plan is to work on my personal projects and see what happens,” Karpathy said in the post Tuesday.
Karpathy, who joined OpenAI in his second stint last year, was previously senior director for artificial intelligence at Tesla (NASDAQ:), where he played a key role in developing artificial intelligence and of the electric car manufacturer’s driver assistance technology.
Karpathy had studied under the eminent Stanford artificial intelligence scientist Fei-Fei Li and joined OpenAI as an early staff member before moving to Tesla. He recently talked about the idea of artificial intelligence known as large language models that act as a new type of computer operating system.