OpenAI's Co-Founder Just Joined Anthropic to Everyone's Surprise

Andrej Karpathy, an original OpenAI co-founder and ex-Tesla AI lead, announced on X this week he's joining Anthropic's pretraining team. Pretraining is the most expensive, compute-intensive phase of building a frontier model.

Because of what he's actually building. Karpathy (the same guy who coined the phrase ‘vibe coding’) is launching a sub-team at Anthropic focused on using Claude to accelerate Claude's own pretraining research. Basically: AI helping train better AI, with one of the field's most respected researchers running it.

It's not great. Karpathy cycled in and out of OpenAI twice before this, then ran Tesla's Full Self-Driving program. The timing is also brutal: OpenAI is gearing up for a major IPO, and Anthropic just told investors it's about to post its first-ever quarterly profit.

Google announced Gemini Spark at I/O 2026 this week. It's a persistent AI agent that runs 24/7 in Google's cloud, continuously monitoring your tasks, tracking info you've asked about, and taking actions across Gmail, Calendar, and Docs without you opening the app.

It's bundled inside the new Google AI Ultra plan at $100/month, which also comes with 20TB of cloud storage and early access to new Gemini models. Spark starts in beta.

That's the question. Spark sits inside Google's bigger pivot from AI as a destination to AI as background infrastructure. It's also the most invasive AI product any major company has shipped, an agent reading your emails while you sleep.

Whether it’s powerful and cutting-edge, or dystopian is a matter of perspective.

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Klarna just launched a Shopping Search app inside ChatGPT that pulls live prices from over 100 million products across 13 markets. This week, use it to actually buy something you need.

Here's what to do:

🎯 Step 1: Pick something real Not a hypothetical. Pick something you'd actually buy this week, headphones, a kitchen gadget, a birthday gift.

💬 Step 2: Open ChatGPT and connect Klarna In ChatGPT, find Klarna in the Apps menu. Then describe what you want in plain English, including budget and any constraints.

🔍 Step 3: Compare without tab-juggling Ask follow-ups: "show me cheaper alternatives," "what about used options," "which has the best reviews." All inside the chat, no Amazon tabs.

🛒 Step 4: Pull the trigger Jump straight to the merchant from the recommendation and buy it. Time the whole thing start to finish.

🚀 Step 5: Was it worth it? Did agentic shopping actually beat your usual research routine or just waste your morning?

Will Karpathy's recursive Claude experiment finally close Anthropic's gap with Google? And would you actually trust Spark with your inbox?