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Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]
441–450 of 827 posts
Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]
#442Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it's monkeylike quality and you need a million tries, it's shit. It you need four tries and one of those is top-tier professional programmer quality, then it's good.
Top-tier professional programmer quality is exceedingly, impractically optimistic, for a few reasons. 1. There's a low probability of that in the first place. 2. You need to be a top-tier professional programmer to recognize that type of quality (i.e. a junior engineer could select one of the 3 shit PRs) 3. When it doesn't produce TTPPQ, you wasted tons of time prompting and reviewing shit code and still need to deli…
Also as a consequence of (1) the LLMs are trained on mediocre code mostly, so they often output mediocre or bad solutions.
Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]
#443The beginning was painful to watch as is the cheering in this comment section. The 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 simply aren't making sense. They imply a kind of a succession and replacement and demonstrate a lack of how programming works. It sounds as marketing oriented as "Web 3.0" that has been born inside an echo chamber. And yet halfway through, the need for determinism/validation is now being reinvented. The analogies make…
The whole AI scene is starting to feel a lot like the cryptocurrency bubble before it burst. Don’t get me wrong, there’s real value in the field, but the hype, the influencers, and the flashy “salon tricks” are starting to drown out meaningful ML research (like Apple's critical research that actually improves AI robustness). It’s frustrating to see solid work being sidelined or even mocked in favor of vibe-coding. Me…
I think part of the problem is that people have the wrong mental models currently.
I am a non-software engineer and I fully expect someday to be a professional "vibe coder". It will be within a domain though and not a generalist like a real software engineer.
I think "vibe coding" in this context will have a type of relationship to software engineering the way excel has a relationship to the professional mathematician.
The knocks on "vibe coding" by software engineers are like a mathematician shitting on Excel for not being able to do symbolic manipulation.
It is not wrong but missing the forest for the trees.
Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
Office software, CAD systems, Web Browsers, the list is long.
Microsoft (famously developing somewhat popular office-like software) seems to be going in the direction of almost forcing developers to use LLMs to assist with coding, at least going by what people are willing to admit publicly and seeing some GitHub activity. Google (made a small browser or something) also develops their own models, I don't think it's far fetched to imagine there is at least one developer on the Ch…
'forcing' anybody to do anything means they don't like doing it, usually because it causes them more work or headache or discomfort.
You know, the exact opposite of what AI providers are claiming it does.
Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 analo…
I think this is the moment you're referring to? https://youtu.be/LCEmiRjPEtQ?si=QWkimLapX6oIqAjI&t=236
> maybe you've seen a lot of GitHub code is not just like code anymore there's a bunch of like English interspersed with code and so I think kind of there's a growing category of new kind of code so not only is it a new programming paradigm it's also remarkable to me that it's in our native language of English and so when this blew my mind a few uh I guess years ago now I tweeted this and um I think it captured the attention of a lot of people and this is my currently pinned tweet uh is that remarkably we're now programming computers in English now
I agree that it's remarkable that you can tell a computer "What is the biggest city in Maresme?" and it tries to answer that question. I don't think he's saying "English is the best language to make complicated systems uncomplicated with", or anything to that effect. Just like I still think "Wow, this thing is fucking flying" every time I sit onboard a airplane, LLMs are kind of incredible in some ways, yet so "dumb" in some other ways. It sounds to me like he's sharing a similar sentiment but about LLMs.
> although it's "in one ear, out the other" with most of his audience.
Did you talk with them? Otherwise this is just creating an imaginary argument against some people you just assume they didn't listen.
> 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?
If I wanted to eat a donut at that point, I guess I'd eat it anyways? But my aversion to risk (or rather the lack of it) tend to be non-typical.
What does my answer mean in the context of LLMs and non-determinism?
> You also expect deterministic outcomes when making analogies with power plants and fabs.
Are you saying that the analogy should be deterministic or that power plants and fabs are deterministic? Because I don't understand if the former, and the latter really isn't deterministic by any definition I recognize that word by.
Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
All the devs I work with would have to go through me to touch the infra anyway, so I'm not sure I see the issue here. No one is saying they need to deploy fully through the stack. It's a great start for them and I can help them along the way just like I would with anyone else deploying anything.
Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
LLM APIs are pretty darn cheap for most of the developed worlds income levels.
Yeah, because they're bleeding money like crazy now. You should consider how much it actually costs, not how much they charge. How do people fail to consider this?
Just wait for the enshitencation of LLM services.
It going to get wild when the tech bro investors demand ads be the included in responses.
It will be trivial for a version of AdWords where someone pays for response words be replaced. “Car” replaced by “Honda”, variable names like “index” by “this_index_variable_is_sponsered_by_coinbase” etc.
I’m trying to be funny with the last one but something like this will be coming sooner than later. Remember, google search used to be good and was ruined by bonus seeking executives.
Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 analo…
Your experience with fabs must be somewhat limited if you think that the state of the art in fabs produces deterministic results. Please lookup (or ask friends) for the typical yields and error mitigation features of modern chips and try to visualize if you think it is possible to have determinism when the density of circuits starts to approach levels that cannot be imspected with regular optical microscopes anymore. Modern chip fabrication is closer to LLM code in even more ways than what is presented in the video.
Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]
#44995% 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…
You just described Software 4.0...
Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 analo…
Either way, I am not sure it is a requirement on HN to read/view the source. Particularly not a 40min video. Maybe it is tongue-in-cheek, maybe I am serious. I am not sure myself. But sometimes the interesting discussions comes from what is on top of the posters mind when viewing the title. Is that bad?
> Is that bad?
It doesn't have to be. But it does get somewhat boring and trite after a while when you start noticing that certain subjects on HN tend to attract general and/or samey comments about $thing, rather than the submission topic within $thing, and I do think that is against the guidelines.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals [...] Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. [...]
The specific part of:
> English is a terrible language for deterministic outcomes
Strikes me as both as a generic tangent about LLMs, and the comment as a whole feels like a shallow dismissal of the entire talk, as Karpathy never claims English is a good language for deterministic outcomes, nor have I heard anyone else make that claim.