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Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

dwarkesh.com

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Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#631

Post by dang »

sosodev wrote: post #77

I think it's a shame that a 146 minute podcast released ~55 minutes ago has so much discussion. Everybody here is clearly just reacting to the title with their own biases. I know it's against the guidelines to discuss the state of a thread, but I really wish we could have thoughtful conversations about the content of links instead of title reactions.

It takes time for more reflective comments to appear, because reflection is a slower mental operation. Reflexive responses are much faster and tend to be generic and shallow. (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...)

I believe this distinction is pretty fundamental to humans, so we're not likely to escape it, but the good news is that reflective comments do show up eventually if the article is substantive and the reflexive ones haven't ruined the thread. We also try to downweight the more reflexive subthreads.

More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45625084.

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#632

Post by jb1991 »

nearbuy wrote: post #475
jb1991 wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Turing Test was never about AGI.

That's pretty much exactly what Alan Turing made the Turing test for. From the Wikipedia entry: > The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1949, is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to that of a human. > The test was introduced by Turing in his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" while working at the University of Manchester. It open…

Cherry-picking is not a meaningful contribution to this discussion. You are ignoring the entire section on that page called “Weaknesses”.

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#633

Post by [deleted] »

aik wrote: post #540
eddiewithzato wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that's the definition that is leading to all these investments, the promise that very soon they will reach it. If Altman said plainly that LLMs will never reach that stage, there would be a lot less investment into the industry.

Hard disagree. You don’t need AGI to transform countless workflows within companies, current LLMs can do it. A lot of the current investments are to help with the demand with current generation LLMs (and use cases we know will keep opening up with incremental improvements). Are you aware of how intensely all the main companies that host leading models (azure, aws, etc) are throttling usage due to not enough data cent…

[deleted]

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#634

Post by dang »

meowface wrote: post #126
sosodev wrote: post #77

I think it's a shame that a 146 minute podcast released ~55 minutes ago has so much discussion. Everybody here is clearly just reacting to the title with their own biases. I know it's against the guidelines to discuss the state of a thread, but I really wish we could have thoughtful conversations about the content of links instead of title reactions.

Eh, Dwarkesh has to market the podcasts somehow. I think it's fine for him to use hooks like this and for HN threads to respond to the hooks. 99% of HN threads only ever reply to the headline and that's not changing anytime soon. This will likely cause many people (including myself) to watch the full podcast when we otherwise might not have. The criticism that people are only replying to a tiny portion of the argumen…

99%? I have to stick up for HN here!

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#635

Post by [deleted] »

baobun wrote: post #411
meindnoch wrote: post #320

People keep talking about AGI as if it's some mystical leap beyond human capability. But let's be honest; software development at a modern startup is already the upper bound of applied intelligence. You're juggling shifting product specs, ambiguous user feedback, legacy code written by interns, and five competing JS frameworks, all while shipping on a Friday. Models can now do that. They can reason about asynchronous…

> software development at a modern startup is already the upper bound of applied intelligence. The hubris and myopia is staggering.

[deleted]

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#636

Post by jaza »

newsclues wrote: post #278
dlcarrier wrote: post #241

Redefinitions aside, fully capable AI is right up there with commercially viable fusion power, cost effective quantum completing, and fully capable self-driving cars, as a technology that is quickly advancing yet always a decade or two away.

What was the last example where humans succeeded at a hard problem like that? Space flight?

We've "succeeded" at space flight about as much as we've "succeeded" at AI. Yay, man on the moon! Over half a century later, and it turns out that the "next small step" - man on Mars - isn't so small and still hasn't been achieved. Anything remotely resembling sci-fi-style ubiquitous space travel remains exactly that - sci-fi!

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#637

Post by BoorishBears »

Rudybega wrote: post #498
BoorishBears wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what about the fact frontier labs are spending more compute on viral AI video slop and soon-to-be-obsoleted workplace usecases than research? Even if you don't understand the technicals, surely you understand if any party was on the verge of AGI they wouldn't behave as these companies behave?

> what about the fact frontier labs are spending more compute on viral AI video slop and soon-to-be-obsoleted workplace usecases than research? That's a bold claim, please cite your sources. It's hard to find super precise sources on this for 2025, but epochAI has a pretty good summary for 2024. (with core estimates drawn from the Information and NYT https://epoch.ai/data-insights/openai-compute-spend The most releva…

Sorry I'm giving too much credit to the reader here I guess.

"AI slop and workplace usecases" is a synecdoche for "anything that is not completing then deploying AGI".

The cost of Sora 2 is not the compute to do inference on videos, it's the ablations that feed human preference vs general world model performance for that architecture for example. It's the cost of rigorous safety and alignment post-training. It's the legal noise and risk that using IP in that manner causes.

And in that vein, the anti-signal is stuff like the product work that is verifying users to reduce content moderation.

These consumer usecases could be viewed as furthering the mission if they were more deeply targeted at collecting tons of human feedback, but these applications overwhelmingly are not architected to primarily serve that benefit. There's no training on API usage, there's barely any prompts for DPO except when they want to test a release for human preference, etc.

None of this noise and static has a place if you're serious about to hit AGI or even believe you can on any reasonable timeline. You're positing that you can turn grain of sand into thinking intelligent beings, ChatGPT erotica is not on the table.

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#639

Post by harrall »

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #134
Imnimo wrote: post #68

>What takes the long amount of time and the way to think about it is that it’s a march of nines. Every single nine is a constant amount of work. Every single nine is the same amount of work. When you get a demo and something works 90% of the time, that’s just the first nine. Then you need the second nine, a third nine, a fourth nine, a fifth nine. While I was at Tesla for five years or so, we went through maybe three…

The interview which I've watched recently with Rich Sutton left me with the impression that AGI is not just a matter of adding more 9s. The interviewer had an idea that he took for granted: that to understand language you have to have a model of the world. LLMs seem to udnerstand language therefore they've trained a model of the world. Sutton rejected the premise immediately. He might be right in being skeptical here…

I don’t have a deep understand of LLMs but don’t they fundamentally work on tokens and generate a multi-dimensional statistical relationship map between tokens?

So it doesn’t have to be LLM. You could theoretically have image tokens (though I don’t know in practice, but the important part is the statistical map).

And it’s not like my brain doesn’t work like that either. When I say a funny joke in response to people in a group, I can clearly observe my brain pull together related “tokens” (Mary just talked about X, X is related to Y, Y is relevant to Bob), filter them, sort them and then spit out a joke. And that happens in like less than a second.

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#640

Post by BoorishBears »

dwaltrip wrote: post #503
BoorishBears wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what about the fact frontier labs are spending more compute on viral AI video slop and soon-to-be-obsoleted workplace usecases than research? Even if you don't understand the technicals, surely you understand if any party was on the verge of AGI they wouldn't behave as these companies behave?

They don’t.

Is that why Sam is on Twitter people paying them $20 a month is their top compute priority as they double compute in response to people complaining about their not-AGI that is a constant suck between deployment, and stuff like post-training specifically for making the not-AGI compatible with outside brand sensibilities?
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