Agentic AI, the latest buzzword dominating the tech industry, took centre stage at Google’s annual developers conference, Google I/O, on Tuesday. Held near the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, the event saw Google unveil a series of AI-focused products and features, including its upcoming AI agent, Gemini Spark.
“We are firmly in our agentic Gemini era,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said before a packed amphitheatre. “I’ve played around with all sorts of agents and you can really see the potential, but it’s still early days when it comes to making agents easy to use, super secure and truly helpful.”
The announcement that stole Google’s spotlight
But despite the scale and anticipation surrounding Google I/O, another AI-related development ended up stealing the spotlight online.
Andrej Karpathy — OpenAI co-founder, former Director of AI at Tesla, and one of Silicon Valley’s most influential voices in artificial intelligence — sparked massive buzz after announcing that he had joined Anthropic.
Google’s livestream of the conference drew around 8.5 million views on YouTube. Karpathy’s announcement on X, however, received nearly double that number of views in roughly the same time frame. His post has received 17 million views on the social media platform.
The contrast in engagement quickly became a talking point online. The development did not go unnoticed online, with one user remarking: “This tweet got more views than Google iO ($75M event)”.
“As always, I was waiting for Sam Altman to drop something on the same day as Google I/O, but 2026 seems like Dario's year,” another X user wrote, referring to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.
Who is Andrej Karpathy?
Andrej Karpathy is a founding member of OpenAI and one of the most prominent figures in tech circles.
As one of the founding research scientists at OpenAI, he was at the AI startup between 2015 and 2017.
He later left the company to join Tesla as Director of AI, where he led the Autopilot computer vision team.
In 2023, Karpathy returned to OpenAI for a second stint. During the brief leadership crisis involving CEO Sam Altman, he publicly backed Altman.
However, he left OpenAI again in February 2024 and later went on to launch Eureka Labs, a company focused on AI-driven education.
(Also read: Who is Andrej Karpathy? OpenAI cofounder and one of AI’s most influential figures joins Anthropic)