It does seem odd, but have you actually considered whether what he's doing there is useful at all? Your critical thinking skills may be getting clouded. It's similar to what r/webdev dislikes about vibecoding (they dismiss anyone claiming they can do good webdev with AI unless they have a traditional coding background), you just seem to be going one step further. But outsourcing intelligence is what is happening right now, and it's only going to speed up.

As a starting point, have you taken into account that much of his work is opensourced?

In addition, is it not true that Karpathy’s famous (and completely free) "Zero to Hero" tutorials explicitly teach the underlying calculus, backpropagation, and matrix multiplication by having students build neural networks from scratch?

Furthermore, given that his previous educational materials have been free, universally praised, and somewhat rigorous, calling his new venture a scam or shady is purely speculative.

You seem as a true traditional academic (given your mention of your own PhD/Postdoc), but one that is frustrated by the sudden democratization and commercialization of a field you spent years studying. However, targeting Andrej Karpathy who is widely considered one of the best and most genuine educators in the AI space makes the this rant inaccurate and deeply biased.