It's not about that, he just will profit financially from pumping AI so he pumps AI, no need to go further.
Everything Karphathy said, until his recent missteps, was received as gospel, both in the AI community and outside.
This influencer status is highly valuable, and I would not be surprised if he was approached to gently skew his discourse towards more optimism, a win-win situation ^^
I'll confess I try to ignore industry chatter to a fair degree.