[Introduction to New Wisdom]Andrej Karpathy, the co-founder who returned to OpenAI last year, officially announced his resignation today! He just posted that he will start a new personal project in the future, hoping to create new sparks.
Just now, OpenAI Lianchuang Karpathy suddenly announced his resignation!
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Hello everyone, yes, I just resigned from OpenAI yesterday.
The first thing to clarify is that this is not due to any particular incident, issue, or dispute (though, those conspiracy theories are really interesting, and you are welcome to continue to raise them).
It's actually been a great last year at OpenAI – the team is great, my colleagues are great, and the roadmap for the future is full of exciting possibilities that I'm sure we all have a lot to look forward to matter.
My current plan is to focus on my personal projects and see what sparks come out of them. For those of you who have been following me, you can probably guess what I might do next.
According to an exclusive report from Information, Karpathy is developing a new “AI assistant” and is working closely with OpenAI's research director Bob McGrew.
While ChatGPT is favored by many, OpenAI also hopes to launch an AI that can automate complex tasks, such as filling out expense reports and entering them into accounting software.
Karpathy served as senior director of AI and head of autonomous driving at Tesla, and announced his resignation in July 2022. 5 In the coming year, he will be mainly responsible for the research and development of Autopilot semi-autonomous driving software.
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Then in February 2023, he once again officially announced “rejoining OpenAI.”
And now, exactly one year later, he has once again officially announced his departure from OpenAI. OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood said in a statement, “Andrej left to pursue personal projects. We are deeply grateful for his contribution and wish him all the best in the future.” Currently, his work has been handed over to a A senior researcher with whom he worked closely took over.
Since the OpenAI board fired Sam Altman last year, several senior employees have resigned. Those employees returned to the company with Altman after the board reversed its decision.
Now, Karpathy has become the first core person to leave OpenAI. So, what does he mean by focusing on personal projects?
AI agent? Dedicated to AI education?
Around July last year, Karpathy emphasized the prospects of AI agents in an offline sharing event.
When he first started working at OpenAI (around 2016), the trend in the industry was to study how to use reinforcement learning methods to improve AI agents. For example, many projects are creating AI players based on Atari-like games.
What Karpathy wants to do is to create a product with a wider range of applications. However, due to the technology at the time, the effect was not ideal, so he and OpenAI changed direction and began to build larger language models.
Today, AI agents have become a very promising direction again. The simplest example is that no one is using reinforcement learning methods to study AI agents anymore as they were in 2016.
His resignation from OpenAI may be due to his re-seeing of the new opportunities that current technological breakthroughs may bring to AI agents.
Interestingly, the most discussed topic by Karpathy in recent times, besides Vision Pro, is a long article on “learning”.
In this article, he discussed in depth what valuable learning is, and it was forwarded by Manning, director of the Stanford HAI Center, and others.
In addition, almost all the content in his Youtube channel teaches netizens how to understand large models and related technologies.
So his subsequent content may have a lot to do with AI education.
OpenAI hardcore internet celebrity
On his personal homepage, he created a timeline of his work experience. You can clearly see all the processes from becoming OpenAI Lianchuang in 2017, joining Tesla, and returning to OpenAI.
In the past year, Karpathy, who left Tesla, has gradually become an internet celebrity on social media through blogging, posting, and giving lectures.
He also publishes a variety of learning courses on his YouTube platform, and currently has 8 videos online.
Just below the comment announcing his resignation, netizens asked, does it mean more YouTube videos will be online in the future? Karpathy himself said: “I started making the next video two days ago”!
Sebastian, a well-known AI machine learning researcher, also said, “It definitely sounds like there is more educational content in the pipeline.”
It seems that after resigning, Karpathy will have plenty of time to update videos.
In addition, on social platforms, Karpathy himself often pays attention to some hot research and posts his own comments, and sometimes puts forward his own opinions.
For example, he once likened the large model to an operating system because it can retrieve files, write code, run programs, and understand audio, images, and human commands.
For another example, put forward your views on the “Language Model Illusion Problem” and so on.
Li Feifei, a master disciple and a technical master of “power generation with love”
Not only a technology influencer, Andrej Karpathy is an out-and-out technology guru.
He first received a bachelor's degree in computer science and physics from the University of Toronto in 2009, and then obtained a master's degree from the University of British Columbia in 2011, where his research was on physical analog digital controllers.
While studying for his PhD at Stanford, Karpathy and his mentor Li Feifei jointly studied convolutional/recursive neural network architecture and its applications in computer vision, natural language processing and their intersection fields.
The two masters and apprentices also designed a new course (CS231n) on Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition at Stanford University, with Karpathy personally serving as the first lecturer. And this is the first deep learning course offered by Stanford!
The number of students has also grown from 150 in 2015 to 330 in 2016 and to 750 in 2017. Today, Stanford University's CS231n has become a must-see basic course for beginners of deep learning, especially those in the CV direction.
In addition to the “star power” of the famous Li Feifei, Karpathy has personally contributed a lot from course design to giving lectures.
While he was in school, he also went to Google for internships – twice, the kind that went abroad, and participated in deep learning and computer vision projects at Google.
In 2015, he went to DeepMind for another internship in the deep reinforcement learning team. After graduation, Karpathy joined OpenAI in 2016 as a research scientist, responsible for deep learning in computer vision, generative modeling, and reinforcement learning.
“Stanford doctoral student, Li Feifei's disciple, former OpenAI researcher and one of the founders”, these titles have also made him famous in Silicon Valley.
Sure enough, after only working at OpenAI for a year and a half, he was poached by Musk to Tesla, replacing former Apple executive Chris Lattner as Tesla's Director of AI and Autopilot Vision. .
Since Karpathy loves studying neural networks, he writes a lot of technical blogs in his spare time and develops multiple deep learning libraries in Javascript (such as ConvNetJS, RecurrentJS, REINFORCEjs, t-sneJS).
It has even been jokingly called the “human flesh reference” of ImageNet.
In addition, whenever he has time, he will maintain his “power with love” arxiv-sanity, a website that can search and organize nearly 100,000 arXiv papers on machine learning in the past 6 years.
References:
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-researcher-andrej-karpathy-departs?rc=epv9gi