Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#421

Post by nevertoolate » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 3:56 PM UTC

diggan wrote: post #378

chamomeal wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say this all the time! Does anybody really want to be an assembly line QA reviewer for an automated code factory? Sounds like shit. Also I can’t really imagine that in the first place. At my current job, each task is like 95% understanding all the little bits, and then 5% writing the code. If you’re reviewing PRs from a bot all day, you’ll still need to understand all the bits before you accept it. So how much time…

> Does anybody really want to be an assembly line QA reviewer for an automated code factory? Sounds like shit. On the other hand, does anyone really wanna be a code-monkey implementing CRUD applications over and over by following product specifications by "product managers" that barely seem to understand the product they're "managing"? See, we can make bad faith arguments both ways, but what's the point?

Issue is if product people will do the “coding” and you have to fix it is miserable

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#422

Post by guappa » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 3:56 PM UTC

infecto wrote: post #318

NoOn3 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's cheap now. But if you take into account all the training costs, then at such prices they cannot make a profit in any way. This is called dumping to capture the market.

No doubt the complete cost of training and to getting where we are today has been significant and I don’t know how the accounting will look years from now but you are just making up the rest based on feelings. We know operationally OpenAI is profitable on purely the runtime side, nobody knows how that will look when accounting for R&D but you have no qualification to say they cannot make a profit in any way.

Except they have to retrain constantly, so why would you not consider the cost of training?

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#423

Post by tudorizer » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 3:58 PM UTC

diggan wrote: post #410

tudorizer wrote: post #405

95% terrible expression of the landscape, 5% neatly dumbed down analogies. English is a terrible language for deterministic outcomes in complex/complicated systems. Vibe coders won't understand this until they are 2 years into building the thing. LLMs have their merits and he sometimes aludes to them, although it almost feels accidental. Also, you don't spend years studying computer science to learn the language/synt…

> English is a terrible language for deterministic outcomes in complex/complicated systems I think that you seem to be under the impression that Karpathy somehow alluded to or hinted at that in his talk, which indicates you haven't actually watched the talk, which makes your first point kind of weird. I feel like one of the stronger points he made, was that you cannot treat the LLMs as something they're explicitly no…

I watched the entire talk, quite carefully. He explicitly states how excited he was about his tweet mentioning English.

The disclaimer you mention was indeed mentioned, although it's "in one ear, out the other" with most of his audience.

If I give you a glazed donut with a brief asterisk about how sugar can cause diabetes will it stop you from eating the donut?

You also expect deterministic outcomes when making analogies with power plants and fabs.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#424

Post by neuronic » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 3:58 PM UTC

kordlessagain wrote: post #414

practal wrote: post #50

Great talk, thanks for putting it online so quickly. I liked the idea of making the generation / verification loop go brrr, and one way to do this is to make verification not just a human task, but a machine task, where possible. Yes, I am talking about formal verification, of course! That also goes nicely together with "keeping the AI on a tight leash". It seems to clash though with "English is the new programming l…

This thread perfectly captures what Karpathy was getting at. We're witnessing a fundamental shift where the interface to computing is changing from formal syntax to natural language. But you can see people struggling to let go of the formal foundations they've built their careers on.

It's called gatekeeping and the gatekeepers will be the ones left in the dust. This has been proven time and time again. Better learn to go with the flow - judging LLMs on linear improvements or even worse on today's performance is a fool's errand.

Even if improvements level off and start plateauing, things will still get better and for careful guided, educated use LLMs have already become a great accelerator in many ways. StackOverflow is basically dead now which in itself is a fundamental shift from just 3-4 years ago.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#425

Post by kypro » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 3:59 PM UTC

I know we've had thought leaders in tech before, but am I the only one who is getting a bit fed up by practically anything a handful of people in the AI space say being circulated everywhere in tech spaces at the moment?

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#426

Post by pphysch » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 3:59 PM UTC

kordlessagain wrote: post #415

darqis wrote: post #193

when I started coding at the age of 11 in machine code and assembly on the C64, the dream was to create software that creates software. Nowadays it's almost reality, almost because the devil is always in the details. When you're used to write code, writing code is relatively fast. You need this knowledge to debug issues with generated code. However you're now telling AI to fix the bugs in the generated code. I see it…

Kids? Think about all the domain experts, entrepreneurs, researchers, designers, and creative people who have incredible ideas but have been locked out of software development because they couldn't invest 5-10 years learning to code. A 50-year-old doctor who wants to build a specialized medical tool, a teacher who sees exactly what educational software should look like, a small business owner who knows their industry…

> These people have been sitting on the sidelines because the barrier to entry was so high.

This comment is wildly out of touch. The SMB owner can now generate some Python code. Great. Where do they deploy it? How do they deploy it? How do they update it? How do they handle disaster recovery? And so on and so forth.

LLMs accelerate only the easiest part of software engineering, writing greenfield code. The remaining 80% is left as an exercise to the reader.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#427

Post by ivape » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 4:00 PM UTC

thierrydamiba wrote: post #401

blixt wrote: post #394

If we extrapolate these points about building tools for AI and letting the AI turn prompts into code I can’t help but reach the conclusion that future programming languages and their runtimes will be heavily influenced by the strengths and weaknesses of LLMs. What would the code of an application look like if it was optimized to be efficiently used by LLMs and not humans? * While LLMs do heavily tend towards expectin…

Is a world driven by the strengths and weaknesses of programming languages better than the one driven by the strengths and weaknesses of LLMs?

Better to think of it as a world driven by the strengths and weaknesses of people. Is the world better if more people can express themselves via software? Yes.

I don’t believe in coincidences. I don’t think the universe provided AI by accident. I believe it showed up just at the moment where the universe wants to make it clear - your little society of work and status and money can go straight to living hell. And that’s where it’s going, the developer was never supposed to be a rockstar, they were always meant to be creatives who do it because they like it. Fuck this job bullshit, those days are over. You will program the same way you play video games, it’s never to be work again (it’s simply too creative).

Will the universe make it so a bunch of 12 year olds dictate software in natural language in a Roblox like environment that rivals the horeshit society sold for billions just a decade ago? Yes, and thank god. It’s been a wild ride, thank you god for ending it (like he did with nuclear bombs after ww2, our little universe of war shrunk due to that).

Anyways, always pay attention to the little details, it’s never a coincidence. The universe doesn’t just sit there and watch our fiasco believe it or not, it gets involved.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#428

Post by superfrank » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 4:00 PM UTC

iLoveOncall wrote: post #197

superfrank wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On one hand, I'm incredibly impressed by the technology behind that demo. On the other hand, I can't think of many things that would piss me off more than a non-deterministic operating system. I like my tools to be predictable. Google search trying to predict that I want the image or shopping tag based on my query already drives me crazy. If my entire operating system did that, I'm pretty sure I'd throw my computer o…

> incredibly impressed by the technology behind that demo An LLM generating some HTML?

At a speed that feels completely seamless to navigate through. Yeah, I'm pretty impressed by that.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#429

Post by variadix » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 4:02 PM UTC

mistersquid wrote: post #357

notTooFarGone wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can recognize images in one look. How about that 400 Line change that touches 7 files?

> I can recognize images in one look. > How about that 400 Line change that touches 7 files? Karpathy discusses this discrepancy. In his estimation LLMs currently do not have a UI comparable to 1970s CLI. Today, LLMs output text and text does not leverage the human brain’s ability to ingest visually coded information, literally, at a glance. Karpathy surmises UIs for LLMs are coming and I suspect he’s correct.

The thing required isn’t a GUI for LLMs, it’s a visual model of code that captures all the behavior and is a useful representation to a human. People have floated this idea before LLMs, but as far as I know there isn’t any real progress, probably because it isn’t feasible. There’s so much intricacy and detail in software (and getting it even slightly wrong can be catastrophic), any representation that can capture said detail isn’t going to be interpretable at a glance.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#430

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 4:03 PM UTC

BobbyJo wrote: post #403

karpathy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kind of say it in words (agreeing with you) but I agree the versioning is a bit confusing analogy because it usually additionally implies some kind of improvement. When I’m just trying to distinguish them as very different software categories.

The versioning makes sense to me. Software has a cycle where a new tool is created to solve a problem, and the problem winds up being meaty enough, and the tool effective enough, that the exploration of the problem space the tool unlocks is essentially a new category/skill/whatever. computers -> assembly -> HLL -> web -> cloud -> AI Nothing on that list has disappeared, but the work has changed enough to warrant a fe…

For me it's even simpler:

V1.0: describing solutions to specific problems directly, precisely, for machines to execute.

V2.0: giving machine examples of good and bad answers to specific problems we don't know how to describe precisely, for machine to generalize from and solve such indirectly specified problem.

V3.0: telling machine what to do in plain language, for it to figure out and solve.

V2 was coded in V1 style, as a solution to problem of "build a tool that can solve problems defined as examples". V3 was created by feeding everything and the kitchen sink into V2 at the same time, so it learns to solve the problem of being general-purpose tool.