OpenAI Co-Founder Andrej Karpathy Is Influencing the A.I. Startup Sector

After leaving the artificial intelligence behemoth twice, OpenAI co-founder and research scientist Andrej Karpathy has been creating headlines in the startup scene since his most recent departure a year ago. Lambda is an artificial intelligence infrastructure firm that Karpathy invested in earlier this month. The round was $480 million and was backed by a number of prominent investors, including Nvidia and Cathie Wood's Ark Invest. Karpathy now has a growing number of artificial intelligence (AI) businesses in its portfolio, including Lambda. Many of these firms target profitable areas of AI, such as compute infrastructure and agent AI. Karpathy has not only left OpenAI, but also started an AI education portal that provides courses at the university level on many AI-related subjects.

With 701,000 subscribers, Karpathy's YouTube channel courses are renowned for combining state-of-the-art research with practical insights, making him a prominent figure in artificial intelligence teaching. Additionally, he is quite visible on GitHub, where he has amassed roughly 100,000 followers.

At the University of Toronto, Karpathy studied computer science and physics with Geoffrey Hinton in his deep learning lectures; he went on to receive a Ph.D. at Stanford University with Fei-Fei Li, but his interest in artificial intelligence started while he was there. Before departing OpenAI in 2017 to head up Tesla's Autopilot project, he was one of eleven co-founders and a major contributor to the GPT model. After taking a leave in February 2024, he came back to OpenAI in February 2023 to work as a research scientist, assembling a small team to improve GPT-4's capabilities.

Karpathy has been involved with or invested in the following six startups:

Eureka Labs 

After departing OpenAI last summer, Karpathy established Eureka Labs with the mission of making artificial intelligence education available to everyone. Students can get technical training and instruction in creating their own artificial intelligence models in the platform's flagship course, LLM101n, which is available to them at the undergraduate level. Currently, LLM101n can be found as a free educational repository on GitHub.

Lambda

Lambda, a business that offers AI developers, researchers, and Fortune 500 corporations access to high-performance computing resources like Nvidia's GPU clusters, just raised $480 million in Series D funding, including Karpathy as a participant. Companies like Apple, Intel, Microsoft, and Tencent of China are among its clientele.

According to experts, the rise of Lambda and similar startups indicates a trend in the AI market where cloud compute platforms are replacing model providers as the primary generators of value. The prices of OpenAI and Anthropic's APIs are falling and are getting close to what is called 'at-cost' pricing. A former venture capitalist at SoftBank Vision Fund and current CEO of Flowbo, a startup financed by Y Combinator, Daniel Kang, told Observer that cloud compute platforms are closer to price setters and are profiting from increased A.I. usage, in contrast to model suppliers who are under downward pricing pressure. Karpathy is focusing on infrastructure and apps that will be able to extract value as artificial intelligence scales. Their investments reflect this change.

/dev/agents

Karpathy made an investment in /dev/agents in December 2024. It's a platform for building artificial intelligence agents in the cloud that can simplify software engineering and coding. At a valuation of $500 million, the business managed to raise $56 million. Founders David Singleton and Nicholas Jitkoff, who have extensive experience developing enterprise-level software systems at Google and Meta, are among the company's most senior employees.

Lamini

Lamini is a startup that assists enterprise clients in creating custom LLMs. Karpathy was a part of their $25 million series A financing in May 2024. The company was started and is now run by Sharon Zhou, who was previously the product manager for machine learning at Google Cloud. Zhou earned her doctorate in artificial intelligence from Andrew Ng, who co-founded Google Brain and is an investor in the $325 million business. Other backers include LVMH, Dropbox, and Zhou herself.

Perplexity AI

Karpathy was one of several investors who put $63 million into Perplexity AI in April 2024. Others included Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and Stanley Druckenmiller. Perplexity AI was established by Aravind Srinivas, a former researcher at OpenAI. Its "answer engine" is renowned for its ability to summarize online information in order to answer user questions. This makes it a popular tool for research and fact-checking, as opposed to simply providing links based on a few key words. The firm is worth $9 billion after raising $915 million in seven funding rounds.

Adept

David Luan, a former researcher of OpenAI, established Adept in 2022 to create artificial intelligence helpers capable of comprehending and accurately carrying out complicated tasks. Automating repetitive workflows across software applications is possible with its enterprise A.I. capabilities. Karpathy became an angel investor in Adept in April 2022, when the company raised $65 million. With a valuation of over $1 billion, the firm has successfully raised $415 million in finance.