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

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

#541

Post by andrethegiant » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 6:37 PM UTC

jph00 wrote: post #72

nothrabannosir wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn’t believe my eyes. The www is truly bankrupt. If anyone has a browser plugin which automatically redirects to llms.txt sign me up. Website too confusing for humans? Add more design, modals, newsletter pop ups, cookie banners, ads, … Website too confusing for LLMs? Add an accessible, clean, ad-free, concise, high entropy, plain text summary of your website. Make sure to hide it from the humans! PS: it should be…

The next version of the llms.txt proposal will allow an llms.txt file to be added at any level of a path, which isn't compatible with /.well-known. (I'm the creator of the llms.txt proposal.)

Doesn’t this conflict with the original proposal of appending .md to any resource, e.g. /foo/bar.html.md? Or why not tell servers to respond to the Accept header when it’s set to text/markdown?

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

#542

Post by dang » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 6:38 PM UTC

moralestapia wrote: post #94

dang wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. " " Don't be snarky. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Wait ... but this is true. Maybe I missed a source but I assumed it was somehow common knowledge. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_cras...

> Wait ... but this is true.

(It's been a while since this has come up, so maybe I'll write a longer reply, in case it's useful to you and/or others.)

There are two responses, both important.

The first is that your comment included things that the site guidelines ask commenters to avoid: internet tropes, snark, shallow dismissals (all of which are in "but hey, the guy wrote a couple of fun tweets") as well as outright flamebait ("most likely criminal behavior"). None of that is about being true or not, and if your comment hadn't included those things, I wouldn't have responded.

The second, deeper issue is that correctness—though good in principle—is neither sufficient nor necessary to make a good HN comment. For example, true statements can be used as weapons; or they can be off-topic; or they be ammunition for putdowns, and so on. In such cases, a statement being true can make the comment worse, not better.

For example, consider telling a teenager about the acne on his or her face—pretty brutal, no? yet true. Or, to take an old example of pg's (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6539403), consider telling an old person that they're going to die soon. Also true, also not ok in many circumstances.

Context and intention matter, and a good HN comment needs to be in the intended spirit of the site. That's why correctness isn't a sufficient condition for a good comment, and cannot justify a bad one. If you think about it, it isn't a necessary condition either—people are often simply mistaken, and that's part of good conversation (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32697044).

What the "just the facts" or "but it's true" defense misses is that there are infinitely many facts and truths, and they don't select themselves. Humans do that, according to their motives, and a motive is not a fact.

Here are some other links making similar points in case anyone wants further explanation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35145770 (March 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32909407 (Sept 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32697044 (Sept 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628939 (Aug 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31996470 (July 2022)

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

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

#543

Post by Joel_Mckay » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 6:42 PM UTC

anothermathbozo wrote: post #531

bwfan123 wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> The reality of what these tools can do is sinking in It feels premature to make determinations about how far this emergent technology can be pushed.

The cognitive dissonance is predictable.

Now hold my beer, as I cast a superfluous rank to this trivial 2nd order Tensor, because it looks awesome wasting enough energy to power 5000 homes. lol =3

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

#544

Post by dist-epoch » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 6:46 PM UTC

jamessinghal wrote: post #431

dist-epoch wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no "capture" here, it's trivial to switch LLM/providers, they all use OpenAI API. It's literally a URL change.

This is changing; OpenAI's newer API (Responses) is required to include reasoning tokens in the context while using the API, to get the reasoning summaries, and to use some of the OpenAI provided tools. Google's OpenAI compatibility supports Chat Completions, not Responses. As the LLM developers continue to add unique features to their APIs, the shared API which is now OpenAI will only support the minimal common subs…

It's still trivial to map to a somewhat different API. Google has it's Vertex/GenAI API flavors.

At least for now, LLM APIs are just JSONs with a bunch of prompts/responses in them and maybe some file URLs/IDs.

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

#545

Post by otabdeveloper4 » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 6:47 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.

> We're witnessing a fundamental shift where the interface to computing is changing from formal syntax to natural language.

People have said this every year since the 1950's.

No, it is not happening. LLMs won't help.

Writing code is easy, it's understanding the problem domain is hard. LLMs won't help you understand the problem domain in a formal manner. (In fact they might make it even more difficult.)

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

#546

Post by Joel_Mckay » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 6:53 PM UTC

acedTrex wrote: post #526

bwfan123 wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

In general, the functional use-case traditionally covered by basic heuristics is viable for a reasoning LLM. These are useful for search. media processing, and language translation.

LLM is not AI, and never was... and while the definition has been twisted in marketing BS it does not mean either argument is 100% correct or in err.

LLM is now simply a cult, and a rather old one dating back to the 1960s Lisp machines.

Have a great day =3

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

#547

Post by kapildev » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 6:53 PM UTC

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…

>What would be interesting to see is what those kids produced with their vibe coding.

I think you are referring to what those kids in the vibe coding event produced. Wasn't their output available in the video itself?

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

#548

Post by iLoveOncall » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 6:53 PM UTC

bwfan123 wrote: post #537

iLoveOncall wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He lives in a GenAI bubble where everyone is self-congratulating about the usage of LLMs. The reality is that there's not a single critical component anywhere that is built on LLMs. There's absolutely no reliance on models, and ChatGPT being down has absolutely no impact on anything beside teenagers not being able to cheat on their homeworks and LLM wrappers not being able to wrap.

> The reality is that there's not a single critical component anywhere that is built on LLMs. Remember that there are billion dollar usecases where being correct is not important. For example, shopping recommendations, advertizing, search results, image captioning, etc. All of these usecases have humans consuming the output, and LLMs can play a useful role as productivity boosters.

And none of those are crucial.

His point is that the world is RELIANT on GenAI. This isn't true.

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

#549

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 6:54 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#550

Post by demosthanos » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 6:56 PM UTC

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…

What you're missing is the audience.

This talk is different from his others because it's directed at aspiring startup founders. It's about how we conceptualize the place of an LLM in a new business. It's designed to provide a series of analogies any one of which which may or may not help a given startup founder to break out of the tired, binary talking points they've absorbed from the internet ("AI all the things" vs "AI is terrible") in favor of a more nuanced perspective of the role of AI in their plans. It's soft and squishy rhetoric because it's not about engineering, it's about business and strategy.

I honestly left impressed that Karpathy has the dynamic range necessary to speak to both engineers and business people, but it also makes sense that a lot of engineers would come out of this very confused at what he's on about.