Andrej Karpathy — “We’re summoning ghosts, not building animals”

reinforcement learning is terrible. It just so happens that everything that we had before is much worse. I'm actually optimistic. I think this will work.

I think it's tractable. I'm only sounding pessimistic because when I go on my Twitter timeline, I see all this stuff that makes no sense to me. A lot of it is, I think, honestly just uh fundraising. We're not actually building animals.

We're building ghosts. These like sort of ethereal spirit entities because they're fully digital and they're kind of like mimicking humans. And it's a different kind of intelligence. It's business as usual because we're in an intelligence explosion already and have been for decades.

Everything is gradually being automated. Has been for hundreds of years. Don't write blog posts. Don't do slides.

Don't do any of that. Like build the code, arrange it, get it to work. It's the only way to go. Otherwise, you're missing knowledge.

If you have a perfect AI tutor, maybe you can get extremely far. The geniuses of today are barely scratching the surface of what a human mind can do. I think >> today I'm speaking with Andre Karpathy. Andre, why do you say that this will be the decade of agents and not the year of agents?

>> Mhm. Uh well first of all uh thank you for uh having me here. I'm excited to be here. So the quote that you've just mentioned it's the decade of agents.

That's actually a reaction to an existing pre-existing quote I should say where I think a lot of some of the labs I'm not actually sure who said this but they were alluding to this being the year of agents >> uh with respect to LLMs and uh how they were going to evolve. And I think um I was triggered by that because I feel like there's some overpredictions going on in the industry and uh in my mind this is really a lot more accurately described as the decade of agents and we have some very early agents that are actually like extremely impressive and that I use daily uh you know cloud and codeex and so on but I still feel like there's uh so much work to be done and so I think my like my reaction is like we'll be working with these things for decade they're going to get better ...