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

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

#521

Post by mistersquid »

variadix wrote: post #429
mistersquid wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sai…

> 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.

The visual representation that would be useful to humans is what Karpathy means by “GUI for LLMs”.

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

#522

Post by bwfan123 »

whilenot-dev wrote: post #514

I watched Karpathy's Intro to Large Language Models [0] not so long ago and must say that I'm a bit confused by this presentation, and it's a bit unclear to me what it adds. 1,5 years ago he saw all the tool uses in agent systems as the future of LLMs, which seemed reasonable to me. There was (and maybe still is) potential for a lot of business cases to be explored, but every system is defined by its boundaries nonet…

> Am I all of a sudden the one lacking imagination?

No, The reality of what these tools can do is sinking in.. The rubber is meeting the road and I can hear some screaching.

The boosters are in 5 stages of grief coming to terms with what was once AGI and is now a mere co-pilot, while the haters are coming to terms with the fact that LLMs can actually be useful in a variety of usecases.

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

#523

Post by spamfilter247 »

karpathy wrote: post #57
hgl wrote: post #51

It’s fascinating to think about what true GUI for LLM could be like. It immediately makes me think a LLM that can generate a customized GUI for the topic at hand where you can interact with in a non-linear way.

Fun demo of an early idea was posted by Oriol just yesterday :) https://x.com/OriolVinyalsML/status/1935005985070084197

My takeaway from the demo is less that "it's different each time", but more a "it can be different for different users and their styles of operating" - a poweruser can now see a different Settings UI than a basic user, and it can be generated realtime based on the persona context of the user.

Example use case (chosen specifically for tech): An IDE UI that starts basic, and exposes functionality over time as the human developer's skills grow.

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

#524

Post by abeppu »

jmsdnns wrote: post #513
lubujackson wrote: post #479

Generally, people behind big revolutionary tech are the worst suited for understanding how it will do "in the wild". Forest for the trees and all that. Some good nuggets in this talk, specifically his concept that Software 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 will all persist and all have unique use cases. I definitely agree with that. I disagree with his belief that "anyone can vibe code" mindset - this works to a certain level of fide…

There is another angle to this too. Prior to LLMs, it was amusing to consider how ML folks and software folks would talk passed each other. It was amusing because both sides were great at what they do, neither side understood the other side, and they had to work together anyway. After LLMs, we now have lots of ML folks talking about the future of software, so ething previously established to be so outside their exper…

This seems to be overstating the separation. For people doing applied ML, there's often been a dual responsibility that included a significant amount of software engineering. I wouldn't necessarily listen to such declarations from an ML researcher whose primary output is papers, but from ML engineers who have built and shipped products/services/libraries I think it's much more reasonable.

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

#525

Post by ofjcihen »

diggan wrote: post #499
ofjcihen wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d take it a step further honestly. You need to be precise and exact but you also have to have enough domain knowledge to know when the LLM is making a huge mistake.

> you also have to have enough domain knowledge I'm a bit 50/50 on this. Generally I agree, how are you supposed to review it otherwise? Blindly accepting whatever the LLM tells you or gives you is bound to create trouble in the future, you still need to understand and think about what the thing you're building is, and how to design/architect it. I love making games, but I'm also terrible at math. Sometimes, I end up…

Oh yeah definitely. The context matters.

For making CRUD apps or anything that doesn’t involve security or stores sensitive information I 100 percent agree it’s fine.

The issue I see is that we get some people storing extremely sensitive info in apps made with these and they don’t know enough to verify the security of it. They’ll ask the LLM “is it secure?” But it doesn’t matter if they don’t know it’s not BSing

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

#526

Post by acedTrex »

bwfan123 wrote: post #522
whilenot-dev wrote: post #514

I watched Karpathy's Intro to Large Language Models [0] not so long ago and must say that I'm a bit confused by this presentation, and it's a bit unclear to me what it adds. 1,5 years ago he saw all the tool uses in agent systems as the future of LLMs, which seemed reasonable to me. There was (and maybe still is) potential for a lot of business cases to be explored, but every system is defined by its boundaries nonet…

> Am I all of a sudden the one lacking imagination? No, The reality of what these tools can do is sinking in.. The rubber is meeting the road and I can hear some screaching. The boosters are in 5 stages of grief coming to terms with what was once AGI and is now a mere co-pilot, while the haters are coming to terms with the fact that LLMs can actually be useful in a variety of usecases.

I actually quite agree with this, there is some reckoning on both sides happening. It's quite entertaining to watch, a bit painful as well of course as someone who is on the "they are useless" side and is noticing some very clear usecases where a value add is present.

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

#527

Post by pphysch »

bongodongobob wrote: post #446
pphysch wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

In other words, most of the barriers to leveraging custom software are still present.

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

#528

Post by tomrod »

jmsdnns wrote: post #513
lubujackson wrote: post #479

Generally, people behind big revolutionary tech are the worst suited for understanding how it will do "in the wild". Forest for the trees and all that. Some good nuggets in this talk, specifically his concept that Software 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 will all persist and all have unique use cases. I definitely agree with that. I disagree with his belief that "anyone can vibe code" mindset - this works to a certain level of fide…

There is another angle to this too. Prior to LLMs, it was amusing to consider how ML folks and software folks would talk passed each other. It was amusing because both sides were great at what they do, neither side understood the other side, and they had to work together anyway. After LLMs, we now have lots of ML folks talking about the future of software, so ething previously established to be so outside their exper…

> So I must ask, are ML folks actually qualified to know the future of software engineering?

Probably not CRUD apps typical to back office or website software, but don't forget that ML folks come from the stock of people that built Apollo, Mars Landers, etc. Scientific computing shares some significant overlap with SWE, and ML is a subset of that.

IMHO, the average SWE and ML person are different types when it comes to how they cargocult develop, but the top 10% show significant understanding and re speed across domains.

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

#529

Post by superconduct123 »

lubujackson wrote: post #479

Generally, people behind big revolutionary tech are the worst suited for understanding how it will do "in the wild". Forest for the trees and all that. Some good nuggets in this talk, specifically his concept that Software 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 will all persist and all have unique use cases. I definitely agree with that. I disagree with his belief that "anyone can vibe code" mindset - this works to a certain level of fide…

Where was he was saying you could vibe code beyond a simple app?

He even said it could be a gateway to actual programming

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

#530

Post by uncircle »

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.

> 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.

Yes, telling a subordinate with natural language what you need is called being a product manager. Problem is, the subordinate has encyclopedic knowledge but it's also extremely dumb in many aspects.

I guess this is good for people that got into CS and hate the craft so prefer doing management, but in many cases you still need in your team someone with a IQ higher than room temperature to deliver a product. The only "fundamental" shift here is killing the entry-level coder at the big corp tasked at doing menial and boilerplate tasks, when instead you can hire a mechanical replacement from an AI company for a few hundred dollars a month.

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