Andrej Karpathy
Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".
Andrej Karpathy did not write this page.
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Their wordsDusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*.
- 9 days earlier
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Our reading
Their wordsAs LLMs get better, they will do more and more of the legwork autonomously, and a lot more of our work will rise up the abstractions into oversight and understanding.
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Their wordsas intelligence and code are increasingly abundant, you can ask for large, custom, discardable software artifacts (e.g. web apps, video explainers) that would have never made sense to create before.
- 6 months earlier
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Their wordsTLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other.
- 5 days earlier
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Their wordsSomething I've been thinking about - I am bullish on people (empowered by AI) increasing the visibility, legibility and accountability of their governments.
- 7 days earlier
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Their wordsThe LLMs may elicit an opinion when asked but are extremely competent in arguing almost any direction. This is actually super useful as a tool for forming your own opinions, just make sure to ask different directions and be careful with the sycophancy.
- 3 days earlier
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Their wordsOne common issue with personalization in all LLMs is how distracting memory seems to be for the models. A single question from 2 months ago about some topic can keep coming up as some kind of a deep interest of mine with undue mentions in perpetuity.
- 5 days earlier
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Their wordsI kind of went from 80/20 of like, you know, uh to like 20/80 of writing code by myself versus just delegating to agents. And I don't even think it's 20/80 by now. I think it's a lot more than that. I don't think I've typed like a line of code probably since December basically.
↗Skill Issue: Andrej Karpathy on Code Agents, AutoResearch, and the Loopy Era of AIyoutube.com 1st of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsI think to a large extent you feel like it's a skill issue. It's not that the capability is not there. It's that you just haven't found a way to string it together of what's available.
↗Skill Issue: Andrej Karpathy on Code Agents, AutoResearch, and the Loopy Era of AIyoutube.com 2nd of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsBut now it's not about flops, it's about tokens. So what is your token throughput and what token throughput do you command?
↗Skill Issue: Andrej Karpathy on Code Agents, AutoResearch, and the Loopy Era of AIyoutube.com 3rd of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsthese apps that are on the app store for using these smart home devices, etc. Uh, these shouldn't even exist kind of in a certain sense. Like shouldn't it just be APIs and shouldn't agents be just using it directly?
↗Skill Issue: Andrej Karpathy on Code Agents, AutoResearch, and the Loopy Era of AIyoutube.com 4th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsSo I think the industry just has to reconfigure in so many ways that's like the customer is not the human anymore. It's like agents who are acting on behalf of humans and this refactoring will be will probably be substantial in a certain sense.
↗Skill Issue: Andrej Karpathy on Code Agents, AutoResearch, and the Loopy Era of AIyoutube.com 5th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsSo the question is how do I refactor all the abstractions so that I'm not I have to arrange it once and hit go. The name of the game is how can you get more agents running for longer periods of time without your involvement doing stuff on your behalf?
↗Skill Issue: Andrej Karpathy on Code Agents, AutoResearch, and the Loopy Era of AIyoutube.com 6th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsAnd I've gotten to a certain point and I thought it was like fairly well tuned and then I let auto research go for like overnight and it came back with like tunings that I didn't see.
↗Skill Issue: Andrej Karpathy on Code Agents, AutoResearch, and the Loopy Era of AIyoutube.com 7th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsBut okay, they shouldn't actually be enacting these ideas. There is a queue of ideas and there's maybe an automated scientist that comes up with ideas based on all the archive papers and GitHub repos and it funnels ideas in or researchers can contribute ideas, but it's a single queue and there is workers that pull items and they try them out.
↗Skill Issue: Andrej Karpathy on Code Agents, AutoResearch, and the Loopy Era of AIyoutube.com 8th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsI simultaneously feel like I'm talking to an extremely brilliant PhD student who's been like a systems programmer for their entire life and a 10-year-old.
↗Skill Issue: Andrej Karpathy on Code Agents, AutoResearch, and the Loopy Era of AIyoutube.com 9th of 20 in this recording
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AI alignmentreinforcement learning
Their wordsAnd so you're kind of like you're either on rails and you're part of the super intelligence circuits or you're not on rails and you're outside of the verifiable domains and suddenly everything kind of just like meanders.
↗Skill Issue: Andrej Karpathy on Code Agents, AutoResearch, and the Loopy Era of AIyoutube.com 10th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsSo even though the models have improved tremendously and if you give them an agentic task, they will just go for hours and move mountains for you. And then you ask for like a joke and it has a stupid joke. It's crappy joke from five years ago and it's because it's outside of the it's outside of the RL.
↗Skill Issue: Andrej Karpathy on Code Agents, AutoResearch, and the Loopy Era of AIyoutube.com 11th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsI do think we should expect more speciation in the intelligences. Um like, you know, the animal kingdom is extremely diverse in the brains that exist and there's lots of different niches of of nature and some animals have overdeveloped visual cortex or other part kind of parts and I think we we should be able to see more speciation and um you don't need like this oracle that knows everything.
↗Skill Issue: Andrej Karpathy on Code Agents, AutoResearch, and the Loopy Era of AIyoutube.com 12th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsa swarm of agents on the internet could collaborate to improve LLMs and could potentially even like run circles around frontier labs. Like who knows, you know? Um yeah, like maybe that's even possible. Like frontier labs have a huge amount of trusted compute but the earth is much bigger and has huge amount of untrusted compute.
↗Skill Issue: Andrej Karpathy on Code Agents, AutoResearch, and the Loopy Era of AIyoutube.com 13th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsI do have like cautiously optimistic view of this in software engineering where I do think um it does seem to me like the demand for software will be extremely large. Um and it's just become a lot cheaper.
↗Skill Issue: Andrej Karpathy on Code Agents, AutoResearch, and the Loopy Era of AIyoutube.com 14th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsYou're you're not a completely free agent and you can't actually like be part of that conversation in a fully autonomous um free way. Like if you're inside one of the frontier labs. Like there's some things that you can't say. Uh and conversely there are some things that the organization wants you to say.
↗Skill Issue: Andrej Karpathy on Code Agents, AutoResearch, and the Loopy Era of AIyoutube.com 15th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsAnd I think if you're outside of that frontier lab, your your judgment fundamentally will start to drift because you're not part of the you know, what's coming down the line. And so I feel like my judgment will inevitably start to drift as well.
↗Skill Issue: Andrej Karpathy on Code Agents, AutoResearch, and the Loopy Era of AIyoutube.com 16th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsBut I want there to be a thing that's behind and that uh is kind of like a common working space for intelligences that the entire industry has access to.
↗Skill Issue: Andrej Karpathy on Code Agents, AutoResearch, and the Loopy Era of AIyoutube.com 17th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsyou're going to run out of things that you're going to do purely in the digital space. At some point you have to go to the universe and you have to ask it questions. Um you have to run an experiment and see what the universe tells you to get back to learn something.
↗Skill Issue: Andrej Karpathy on Code Agents, AutoResearch, and the Loopy Era of AIyoutube.com 18th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsIt used to be that you have documentation for other people who are going to use your library, but like you shouldn't do that anymore. Like you should have instead of HTML documents for humans, you have markdown documents for agents.
↗Skill Issue: Andrej Karpathy on Code Agents, AutoResearch, and the Loopy Era of AIyoutube.com 19th of 20 in this recording
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AI and jobsAI agentsneural networks
Their wordsso for example, micro GPT, like I asked I tried to get an agent to write micro GPT. So, I told it like try to boil down the simplest things. Like try to boil down my um neural network training to the simplest thing and it can't do it.
↗Skill Issue: Andrej Karpathy on Code Agents, AutoResearch, and the Loopy Era of AIyoutube.com 20th of 20 in this recording
- 9 days earlier
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Their wordsIntelligence brownouts will be interesting - the planet losing IQ points when frontier AI stutters.
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Their wordsYou can’t fork classical orgs (eg Microsoft) but you’ll be able to fork agentic orgs.
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Their wordsExpectation: the age of the IDE is over Reality: we’re going to need a bigger IDE (imo). It just looks very different because humans now move upwards and program at a higher level - the basic unit of interest is not one file but one agent. It’s still programming.