Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents • Hacker News Board

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

#711

Post by woadwarrior01 » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 9:21 AM UTC

blueside wrote: post #338

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…

LLMs have continually taught me that we have vastly overestimated human intelligence

Perhaps we're overestimating human intelligence and underestimating animal intelligence. Also funny that current LLMs are incapable of continual learning themselves.

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

#712

Post by woadwarrior01 » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 9:23 AM UTC

mwkaufma wrote: post #164

Ten years away, just like it was ten years ago and will be ten years from now.

Controlled fusion has always been 30 years away.

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

#713

Post by zelphirkalt » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 9:23 AM UTC

aerhardt wrote: post #253

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> yeah that "model of the world" would mean: babies are already born with "the model of the world" No, not necessarily. Babies don't interact with the world only by reading what people wrote wikipedia and stackoverflow, like these models are trained. Babies do things to the world and observe what happens. I imagine it's similar to the difference between a person sitting on a bicycle and trying to ride it, vs a person…

We’ve been thinking about reaching the singularity from one end, by making computers like humans, but too little thought has been given to approaching the problem from the other end: by making babies build their world model by reading Stack Overflow.

That's it. Now you've done it! I will have stackoverflow Q&A, as well as moderator comments and closings of questions playing 24/7 to my first not yet born child! Q&A for the knowledge and the mod comments for good behavior, of course. This will lead to singularity in no time!

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

#714

Post by godelski » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 9:27 AM UTC

naasking wrote: post #616

godelski wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well what else is there really? Differentiate from memorization. I'd say there's a difference between a database and understanding. If they're the same, well I think Google created AGI a long time ago.

A database doesn't recite or apply knowledge, it stores knowledge.

It sure recites it when I query it

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

#715

Post by willyxdjazz » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 9:33 AM UTC

Maybe I'm being too simplistic, but I think we're mixing two distinct debates.

Today we have an extraordinary invention—comparable to the wheel in its time. That invention is: predictive inference over all human knowledge. Period. I don't like calling it "Artificial Intelligence" because it's not intelligence; it's a prediction system that can project responses by illuminating patterns across all human knowledge encapsulated in text, audio, and video. What companies like OpenAI call "reasoning" models is simply that predictive process, but in a loop packaged as a product—one of the first marvelous uses of this fascinating invention: predictive inference over all human knowledge.

When the wheel was invented, no one could have imagined that, combined with hundreds of subsequent technologies, it would enable an electric car powered by solar energy. The wheel wasn't autonomous transportation—it was a fundamental component.

I see two debates getting mixed up here:

- The debate about the current invention: A tool that makes encyclopedias "speak" by connecting patterns across all human knowledge. As a tool, that's what it is—nothing more, nothing less. Tremendously useful, but a tool.

- The debate about the future dream: What this invention might enable when combined with hundreds of technologies that don't yet exist—similar to imagining an electric car when you only have the wheel.

It seems many experts are taking positions and getting "upset" because they're mixing these two debates. Some evaluate the wheel as if it should already be a solar electric car. Others defend the wheel by saying it already IS a solar electric car. Both are right in their observations, but they're talking about different things.

LLMs are a fundamental breakthrough—the "wheel" of the information age. But discussing whether they "understand" or have "world models" is like asking whether the wheel "comprehends transportation."

On the danger of confusing capabilities: Conflating the tool with the end goal leads us to poor decisions—from over-investment to under-utilization. When we expect AGI from what is fundamentally a pattern-matching engine, we set ourselves up for disappointment and misallocation of resources. No magic, just reality.

The temporal factor: The AGI debate is a debate about the future—about what might emerge from combinations of technologies we haven't yet invented.

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

#716

Post by rolisz » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 9:35 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #667

stouset wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To play devil’s advocate, you have never seen the night sky. Photoreceptors in your eye have been excited in the presence of photons. Those photoreceptors have relayed this information across a nerve to neurons in your brain which receive this encoded information and splay it out to an array of other neurons. Each cell in this chain can rightfully claim to be a living organism in and of itself. “You” haven’t directly…

That sounds very profound but it isn't: it the sum of your states interaction that is your consciousness, there is no 'consciousness' unit in your brain, you can't point at it, just like you can't really point at the running state of a computer. At that level it's just electrons that temporarily find themselves in one spot or another. Those cells aren't living organisms, they are components of a multi-cellular organi…

Human cells have been reused to do completely different things, without all the other cells around them (eg: Michael Levin and his anthrobots)

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

#717

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 9:37 AM UTC

robotresearcher wrote: post #277

godelski wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that to understand knowledge you have to have a model of the world. You have a small but important mistake. It's to recite (or even apply ) knowledge. To understand does actually require a world model. Think of it this way: can you pass a test without understanding the test material? Certainly we all saw people we thought were idiots do well in class while we've also seen people we thought were geniuses fail. The t…

In my view 'understand' is a folk psychology term that does not have a technical meaning. Like 'intelligent', 'beautiful', and 'interesting'. It usefully labels a basket of behaviors we see in others, and that is all it does. In this view, if a machine performs a task as well as a human, it understands it exactly as much as a human. There's no problem of how to do understanding, only how to do tasks. The 'problem' me…

[deleted]

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

#718

Post by tim333 » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 9:49 AM UTC

danielvaughn wrote: post #537

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…

I have a very surface level understanding of AI, and yet this always seemed obvious to me. It's almost a fundamental law of the universe that complexity of any kind has a long tail. So you can get AI to faithfully replicate 90% of a particular domain skill. That's phenomenal, and by itself can yield value for companies. But the journey from 90%-100% is going to be a very difficult march.

The nines comment was in the context of self driving cars which I can see because you are never perfect driving and accidents can be fatal.

Some AI is like chess though, where they steadily advance in ELO ranking.

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

#719

Post by musebox35 » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 9:50 AM UTC

Honestly, if you have any actual interest in LLMs or other generative ai variants, just go after a concrete goal post that you yourself set with measurable metrics to gauge your progress. Then the predicted timeline from podcasts and blog posts will become irrelevant. Experts and non-experts have both been terrible at predicting timelines since the dawn of ai. Self driving cars and llms are no exception. When you are making predictions based solely on intuition and experience it is mostly an extrapolation. It is not useless. It always helps to ask questions and try to frame the future within the bounds of our current understanding. But at the same time it is important to remember that this is just speculation, not empirical science. That is also why there is such varied opinions on the topic of ai timelines. Relax and enjoy witnessing a major leap in our understanding of natural language, vision, and high dimensional probabilistic vector spaces ;-)

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

#720

Post by 1oooqooq » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 9:55 AM UTC

Hendrikto wrote: post #690

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you are right about the broader (and sort of ill defined) chase toward 'AGI' - another way to look at it is the self driving car - they got there eventually.And, if you work on applications using LLMs you can pretty easily see that Karpathy's sentiment is likely correct. You see it because you do it. Even simple applications are shaped like this, albeit each 9 takes less time than self driving cars for a simple…

> another way to look at it is the self driving car - they got there eventually. No they did not. Elon has been saying Tesla will get there “next year” since 2015. He is still saying that, and despite changing definitions, we still are not there.

i guess the comment you replied proves the actual point "we may never get there, but it will be enough for the market".

sigh, i guess it's time to laugh on that video compilation of elon saying "next week" for 10yrs straight and then cry seeing how much he made of doing that.