Andrej Karpathy, an artificial intelligence researcher and one of the founding members of OpenAI, said in a post on social media platform X that he departed the Microsoft-backed company on Monday.

The news marks a significant departure from OpenAI, one of the top labs competing to develop increasingly capable artificial intelligence.

"My immediate plan is to work on my personal projects and see what happens," Karpathy said in the post on Tuesday.

Karpathy, who joined OpenAI in his second stint last year, was previously a senior director for AI at Tesla where he played a key role in developing the electric car maker's artificial intelligence and driver assistant technology

Karpathy had studied under prominent Stanford AI scientist Fei-Fei Li and joined OpenAI as one of its earliest staffers before moving to Tesla. He recently spoke about the idea of AI known as large language models acting as a new kind of computer operating system.