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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]

#551

He's talking about "LLM Utility companies going down and the world becoming dumber" as a sign of humanity's progress. This if anything should be a huge red flag

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.

Adults everywhere are using it to "cheat" at work, except there it's not cheating, it's celebrated and welcomed as a performance enhancement because results are the only thing that matter, and over time that will result in new expectations for productivity.

It's going to take a while for those new expectations to develop, and they won't develop evenly, just like how even today there's plenty of low-hanging fruit in the form of roles or businesses that aren't using what anyone here would identify as simple opportunities for automation, and the main benefit that accrues to the one guy in the office who knows how to cheat with Excel and VBA is that he gets to slack off most of the time. But there certainly are places where the people in charge expect more, and are quick to perceive when and how much that bar can be raised. They don't care if you're cheating, but you'll need to keep up with the people who are.

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

#552
post #218
post #201

Earlier 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…

> Microsoft

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050152

Very impressive indeed, not a single line of any quality to be found despite them forcing it on people.

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

#553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. H…

LLMs aren’t perfect, but calling them a “cult” misses the point. They’re not just fancy heuristics, they’re general-purpose function approximators that can reason, plan, and adapt across a huge range of tasks with zero task-specific code.

Sure, it’s not AGI. But dismissing the progress as just marketing ignores the fact that we’re already seeing them handle complex workflows, multi-step reasoning, and real-time interaction better than any previous system.

This is more than just Lisp nostalgia. Something real is happening.

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

#554

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.

Exactly! What skeptics don't get is that AGI is already here and we are now starting a new age of infinite prosperity, it's just that exponential growth looks flat at first, obviously...

Quantum computers and fusion energy are basically solved problems now. Accelerate!

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

#555

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.

> 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 couldn't agree with this more. I often get frustrated because I feel like the loudest voices in the room are so laughably extreme. One on side you have the "AGI cultists", and on the other you have the "But the hallucinations!!!" people. I've personally been pretty amazed by the state of AI (nearly all of this stuff was the domain of Star Trek just a few years ago), and I get tons of value out of many of these tools, but at the same time I hit tons of limitations and I worry about the long-term effect on society (basically, I think this "ask AI first" approach, especially among young people, will kinda turn us all into idiots, similar to the way Google Maps made it hard for most of us to remember the simple directions). I also can't help but roll my eyes when I hear all the leaders of these AI companies going on about how AI will make a "white collar bloodbath" - there is some nuggets of truth in that, but these folks are just using scare tactics to hype their oversold products.

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

#556
post #554

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.

Exactly! What skeptics don't get is that AGI is already here and we are now starting a new age of infinite prosperity, it's just that exponential growth looks flat at first, obviously... Quantum computers and fusion energy are basically solved problems now. Accelerate!

This sounds like clear satire to me, but at this point I really can't tell.

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

#557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[flagged]

"Please don't fulminate."

"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#558

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…

I get that, motivating young founders is difficult, and I think he has a charming geeky way of provoking some thoughts. But on the other hand: Why mainframes with time-sharing from the 60s? Why operating systems? LLMs to tell you how to boil an egg, seriously?

Putting my engineering hat on, I understand his idea of the "autonomy slider" as lazy workaround for a software implementation that deals with one system boundary. He should aspire people there to seek out for unknown boundaries, not provide implementation details to existing boundaries. His MenuGen app would probably be better off using a web image search instead of LLM image generation. Enhancing deployment pipelines with LLM setups is something for the last generation of DevOps companies, not the next one.

Please mention just once the value proposition and responsibilities when handling large quantities of valuable data - LLMs wouldn't exist without them! What makes quality data for an LLM, or personal data?

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

#559
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

That looks both cool and infuriating

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

#560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is why I call all this AI stuff BS. Using a formal language is a feature, not a bug. It is a cornerstone of all human engineering and scientific activity and is the _reason_ why these disciplines are successful. What you are describing (ie. ditching formal and using natural language) is moving humanity back towards magical thinking, shamanism and witchcraft.

> What you are describing (ie. ditching formal and using natural language) is moving humanity back towards magical thinking ...

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

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