Karpathy Just Picked Anthropic. That's the Whole Story.
He could have gone anywhere in AI. He didn't. Here's what that one decision tells you about the bets your firm is making right now.
Notes From a Week I Couldn’t Keep Up With
TL;DR: This was the first week in a long time I felt behind on AI. Google I/O was the gravity well. While I was inside it, Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic, the enterprise picture kept tilting Claude’s way, and the AGI-in-a-few-years drumbeat got louder from the people who would actually know. Below: what I saw, what I think it means, and the advice I’m giving the people I care about.
The Week That Got Away From Me
I’m going to write this one differently. No single theme, no clean argument, no tidy takeaway. Just notes from a week that moved faster than I could.
I was at Google I/O. Two days of demos, keynotes, hallway conversations, the works. And while I was inside that bubble, the rest of the industry kept going without me. I came home and looked at my queue and realized I wasn’t just behind on stories. I was behind on stories that actually mattered.
Here’s why I’m sharing this anyway. You feel it too. Every executive I work with has the same complaint right now. The pace is too high. The signal-to-noise ratio is getting worse, not better. And the cost of falling behind compounds every week.
So let me try to clear the table.
Karpathy to Anthropic Is the Signal of the Week
The top story, by some distance, was the report that Andrej Karpathy is joining Anthropic. If you don’t know the name: founding member of OpenAI, ran AI at Tesla, came back to OpenAI, then left to start his own thing. He is one of maybe ten people in the world whose move tells you where the puck is going.
He’s going to Anthropic.
That tells you something. It tells you the same thing the enterprise data has been telling me for six months. Every company I work with has made Claude their primary model. A handful keep ChatGPT or Gemini as a secondary for specific tasks. But Claude is winning the rooms that actually pay for software. Legal, financial services, consulting, life sciences. The serious buyers.
Anthropic also appears to be profitable, which shocked a lot of people who follow this closely. The frontier-lab assumption for the last three years was simple: nobody makes money on these models, you burn cash and hope the next round closes. Anthropic broke that pattern earlier than anyone expected.
And then there’s the compute story. Anthropic now has access to both Colossus I and Colossus II. I cannot overstate how big that is. The single biggest constraint on Anthropic’s growth has been getting enough chips to serve demand. That constraint just loosened by a lot.
Add it up. Profitable. Compute-rich. Hiring the best researchers. Owning the enterprise narrative. That’s what running away looks like.
Google I/O Was Amazing in Person and Mixed on Reflection
Let me be honest. I/O in person is incredible. The energy is real. The product surface area is huge. The leadership talks well. And I’m grateful I was there.
But I’ve spent the week reading what the industry is saying about what actually got announced, and the verdict is mixed at best. I covered the launches earlier in the week, so I won’t rehash them here. Two things stand out on reflection.
First, the product sprawl. Even as someone who pays close attention, I lost track of which Google product does what. Multiple overlapping consumer assistants. Multiple developer surfaces. Multiple agent stacks. A video model whose name I had to look up twice this week. If I can’t keep them straight, your in-house counsel sure can’t. Sprawl is not strategy. It’s a tax on every buyer trying to evaluate you.
Second, the pre-announcements. There were a lot of “coming soon” demos this year. Some are genuinely close. Some are months out. A few felt years away. I’m not ready to call it vaporware. But it reminded me of Microsoft in the early 2000s, when “announcing” became a substitute for “shipping.” If that pattern continues at Google, it will cost them credibility with the buyers they need most.
That said, I came out of two sessions feeling genuinely good. Matthew Berman’s interview with Sundar Pichai was sharp. Berman asked real questions, not the soft puffballs you usually get from a CEO at a developer conference. If you want one piece of source material from this week to actually watch, that’s the one.
The other was Demis Hassabis on stage. Two things he said are still rattling around in my head.
One: the point of AI is to improve human life. Cure disease. Solve problems we’ve been stuck on for decades. That’s the mission. Not chatbots. Not coding assistants. Those are stepping stones.
Two: AGI is a few years away.
I’ve heard that phrasing, or something close to it, from multiple frontier-lab leaders in the last sixty days. Demis on stage. Dario in different language. Sam in his own way. The people who actually run these labs have all moved their public estimates inside this decade. I take that seriously. And I increasingly believe Anthropic has cracked something on recursive self-improvement, which is the mechanism that takes us from “very capable assistant” to something different in kind.
You can argue the timeline. I’d push back hard on anyone who argues the direction.
A Long Conversation With Chubby
I spent almost 90 minutes this week with Chubby covering more ground than I can fit in one paragraph. Google’s strengths and weaknesses. Opus 4.7 with Adaptive thinking versus 4.6 with Extended thinking. US AI strategy against China. Anthropic’s economics and pricing. Codex against Claude Code against Google’s new AntiGravity. The shape of the developer-tools fight over the next twelve months.
I’m going to write that conversation up as its own piece next week, because it deserves real space. The short version is this. The developer-tools layer is where the next big platform shift happens, and the order of finish there is not yet settled. If you’re a firm leader making bets on which AI vendor your team standardizes on, watch the coding tools. They are the leading indicator for everything else.
What I’m Telling My Kids
I’ll allow myself one personal aside, because it kept coming up in family conversations all week and I think it matters for you too.
My oldest is graduating from the University of Oregon this spring. Go Ducks! My middle is now a senior in college. My youngest is finishing up his junior year of high school. Three kids, three different angles into the same question. What does AI mean for the work I was planning to do?
What I tell them, in plain language, is this. The jobs that look most defensible right now are the ones where you’re the person who decides what AI should do, who checks the output for things that would embarrass you, and who owns the relationship with the human on the other end. The jobs that look least defensible are the ones doing the production work in the middle. That’s the part getting eaten first.
So I tell my college kids: build judgment. Get reps making real decisions with real consequences. Internships matter more than ever, not less. And I tell my high schooler: learn to write clearly, learn how to argue, and learn how to use these tools fluently. The combination is rare and it’s going to stay rare.
I also tell all three of them to plan for continual learning as a permanent feature of work, not a phase. Whatever you learn in the next four years has a half-life that’s getting shorter. The people who do well are going to be the people who pick up something new every six months and don’t act like that’s a hardship.
And one more thing that gets undersold in most AI conversations. Look hard at careers that actually require a human across the table from another human, and look just as hard at the skilled trades. An electrician with twenty years of judgment is harder to replace than a paralegal with two. A plumber on a Saturday emergency call is irreplaceable. Therapy, hospice, high-end sales, complex negotiation, hands-on craft. These are not consolation prizes. In the world that’s coming they may turn out to be the most stable bets on the board.
This is the same conversation I think you should be having with your team. Different vocabulary, same substance.
One More Thing
I told you up front this was a stream of consciousness, and it is. I could write a full piece on any one of these threads, and I probably will. If a section pulled at you, hit reply and tell me which one. I’d rather go deep on what you actually want to read than guess.
The pace isn’t slowing down. None of us is going to keep up with all of it. The job is to stay close enough to the parts that matter.
That’s the work this year.
One more thing before I close the laptop. It’s Memorial Day weekend here in the US, and after a week like this one I’m putting the phone down, firing up the grill, and getting in the pool with my kids while they’re still around to get in it with. The news will be waiting on Tuesday. It always is. If you’re stateside, I hope you get a long slow weekend with the people who matter, a good burger, and at least one nap you didn’t plan for. And if you’re reading this from somewhere the calendar didn’t pause, I hope your regular weekend is a little less regular than usual.
Take care of yourselves. See you next week.