Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic as AI centralization debate intensifies; Pluralis releases Agora for distributed GPU training

Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI and angel investor in Prime Intellect, announced he is joining Anthropic. Karpathy had written in 2023 about thinking "a lot about centralization and decentralization" but is now joining what the article describes as perhaps the most hostile major lab toward open-source AI, contrasting with OpenAI and Google, which have released open-weight models, while Anthropic limits access to its frontier model, Mythos.

Pluralis Research released Agora, a pretraining stack that allows non-collocated consumer-grade GPUs to be competitive with centralized clusters. In a pilot run, Pluralis trained an 8B model using Agora; the technology is 15x faster than Megatron-LM in this setting and is only 1.5x less efficient in terms of tokens per unit compute. Consumer-grade GPUs must contain 24GB of VRAM and be located in North America.

Nebius announced GPU rental price increases effective June 1: H100 rentals will cost $2.15/hr to $3.85/hr, up from $1.25–$2.95/hr, representing increases of 26% to 72% depending on conditions.