@shaneguML
I had a chance to chat with Andrej when he visited Tokyo in 2022, right after he wrapped up his 5-year work with Elon (he told me he was "recovering"). It was clear that his true passions are education and empowerment. You can see this reflected on his X feed—there is no hidden agenda, just a genuine desire to share what excites him. In a way, Andrej represents the ultimate nightmare for organizations like OpenAI. His goal is to empower developers outside of closed labs to train their own models, making AI knowledge accessible far beyond a small, elite group. If you empower enough people, closed labs will eventually run out of the capital needed to acquire all that distributed talent, and the monopoly on AI power will dissolve. This is just my speculation, but looking at it through this lens, it makes complete sense why he left OpenAI after just a year.