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Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

dwarkesh.com

411–420 of 1001 posts

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#411

People keep talking about AGI as if it's some mystical leap beyond human capability. But let's be honest; software development at a modern startup is already the upper bound of applied intelligence. You're juggling shifting product specs, ambiguous user feedback, legacy code written by interns, and five competing JS frameworks, all while shipping on a Friday. Models can now do that. They can reason about asynchronous…

> software development at a modern startup is already the upper bound of applied intelligence.

The hubris and myopia is staggering.

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#412
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basically an LLM translating across languages will "light up" (to use a rough fMRI equivalent) for the same concepts (e.g. bigness) across languages I thought that’s the basic premise of how transformers work - they encode concepts into high dimensional space, and similar concepts will be clustered together. I don’t think it models the world, but just the texts it ingested. It’s observation and regurgitation, not u…

That's a model. Not a higher-order model like most humans use, but it's still a model.

I believe that the M in LLM stands for model. It is a statistical model, as it always has been.

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#413
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your brain is doing computation with neurotransmitters instead of transistors If it is, sure. But this isn't a given. We don't actually understand how the brain computes, as evidenced by our inability to simulate it. > Evolution didn't discover some mystical process that imbues meat with special properties Sure. But the complexity remains beyond our comprehension. Against the (nearly) binary action potential of a t…

Jonas & Kording showed that neuroscience methods couldn't reverse-engineer a simple 6502 processor [0]. If the tools can't crack a system we built and fully documented, our inability to simulate brains just means we're ignorant, not that substrate is magic. It also doesn't necessarily say great things for neuroscience! And "who said this?"... come on. Searle, Dreyfus, thirty years of "syntax isn't semantics," all the…

I'm curious what you think understanding means.

I personally do not think operational proficiency and understanding are equivalent.

I can do many things in life pretty well without understanding them. The phenomenon of understanding seems distinct from the phenomenon of doing something/acting proficiently.

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#414

If the transcript is accurate, Karpathy does not actually ever, in this interview, say that AGI is a decade away, or make any concrete claims about how far away AGI is. Patel's title is misleading.

Did the same with Sutton (LLMs are a dead end) when Sutton never said this in the conversation.

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#415
post #370
post #58

I would bet all of my assets of my life that AGI will not be seen in the lifetime of anyone reading this message right now. That includes anyone reading this message long after the lives of those reading it on its post date have ended. Which of course raises the interesting question of how I can make good on this bet.

We are pretty close. There are some insane cutting edge developments being done in private.

I doubt your use of "insane".

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#416

Just like fusion. It will revolutionize the world, but it's always just ... one more decade away.

I can't use fusion power yet.

Several hundred million people are using LLMs every day.

There has to be at least two orders of magnitude more investment in "AI" technologies than there are in fusion techs right now.

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I would bet all of my assets of my life that AGI will not be seen in the lifetime of anyone reading this message right now. That includes anyone reading this message long after the lives of those reading it on its post date have ended. By almost any definition available during the 90s GPT-5 Thinking/Pro would pretty much qualify. The idea that we are somehow not going to make any progress for the next century seems…

They have to say that, or there'll be a loud sucking sound and hundreds of billions in capital will be withdrawn overnight

Ok that's great do you have evidence suggesting scaling is actually plateauing or that capabilities of GPT6 and Claude 4.5 Opus won't be better than models now?

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#418

What's his estimate of how far we are from a definition of AGI?

Can perform out of distribution tasks at least around average human level performance.

Every attempt to formally define "general intelligence" for humans has been a shitshow. IQ tests were literally designed to justify excluding immigrants and sterilizing the "feeble-minded." Modern psychometrics can't agree on whether intelligence is one thing (g factor) or many things, whether it's measurable across cultures, or whether the tests measure aptitude or just familiarity with test-taking and middle-class cultural norms.

Now we're trying to define AGI - artificial general intelligence - when we can't even define the G, much less the I. Is it "general" because it works across domains? Okay, how many domains? Is it "general" because it can learn new tasks? How quickly? With how much training data?

The goalposts have already moved a dozen times. GPT-2 couldn't do X, so X was clearly a requirement for AGI. Now models can do X, so actually X was never that important, real AGI needs Y. It's a vibes-based marketing term - like "artificial intelligence" was (per John McCarthy himself) - not a coherent technical definition.

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#419

Am I dating myself by thinking Kurzweil is still relevant? 2029: Human-level AI 2045: The Singularity - machine intelligence 1 billion times more powerful than all human intelligence Based on exponential growth in computing. He predicts we'll merge with AI to transcend biological limits. His track record is mixed, but 2029 looks more credible post-GPT-5. The 2045 claim remains highly speculative.

> He predicts we'll merge with AI to transcend biological limits.

The merge with a machine 1 million times more intelligent than us is the same as letting AI use our bodies. I'd rather live in cave. Iirc, the 7th episode of Black Mirror starts with this plot line.

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#420
I find it strange AGI is the goal. The label AI is off and irrelevant. A language model is not AI, even a large language model. But language models are still extremely useful and potentially revolutionary. Labelling language models as AI is both under and overstating the value. It's not AI (insert sad trombone), but that doesn't mean it's amazing technology (insert thunderous applause).
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