“There is no drama,” says Karpathy after leaving OpenAI again

OpenAI’s top researcher, Andrej Karpathy, has left the company for the second time to concentrate on personal projects.

In the X post on February 14th, Andrej Karpathy announced that he had left OpenAI. The researcher worked for the company on deep learning for generative models and deep reinforcement learning.

“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,” Karpathy said while explaining his decision.

According to the researcher, the team he worked with was strong and the roadmap was exciting, but he’s planning to work on personal projects in the immediate future. “Those of you who’ve followed me for a while may have a sense for what that might look like,” says he.

Karpathy, one of the early employees of OpenAI, has now left the company for the second time. The first time was in 2017 when he went to work as Senior Director of AI at Tesla. Karpathy worked with the team on self-driving cars in Elon Musk’s company.

Recently, the researcher gained a huge following on social media after posting explainer videos about AI.

While Karpathy is stepping down without any “drama,” OpenAI found itself embroiled in a spectacle last year surrounding the resignation of the company’s CEO and co-founder, Sam Altman.

Following the board’s announcement of Altman's unsuitability for the role, Microsoft swiftly recruited him to lead their AI research team. However, just days later, OpenAI reinstated Altman as its CEO.