No, these are developed off of the assumed uses of the models (predictive autofiller) rather than their actual, cognitive and potential industrial use (developing large scale frameworks for industrial production, automating systems that normally require human monitoring), and uses that we have not yet discovered, because we have not figured out all the constraints and limitations of these models. If Karpathy was in the game like he used to be, he would be on real product. Right now he’s probably so lost by the very thing he helped create that he is stuck doing these mini projects for his own personal interest, without anyone really critically engaging with his work.

I don't think that's the parents implication.

Generally, when a "good" developer has a huge public presence and reputation, that's quite valuable to a company when they're competing in a tough space. Many a time, more so than the (very high) technical skill of the developer in question.

I've seen large funded companies gather good popular developers like pokemon cards and just have them go around give talks and write blog posts. It creates an aura around them which makes things like hiring, fund raising etc. much easier.

So, it's not really a statement about Karpathy himself. It's more about the company hiring him.

> That implies Karpathy is either dumb or desperate

This kind of thing happens to big names in software all the time. Carmack going to Facebook is a prime example - he joined with the idea of using all those resources to build world-changing tech, and instead he ended up headlining conferences, and fighting a losing battle against the corporate types who were put in charge of Oculus.

No it doesn’t? It matches his skills to the lab’s needs. Karpathy is a media personality, manager, and educator far more than he is a hands-on researcher.

He already stated his motivation a few months ago in an interview with Dwarkesh - basically saying that he might join one of the big labs, for a while, to keep in touch with frontier research.

Andrej seems like a great guy, but him joining Anthropic feels a bit like a transactional relationship (old guy marries hot young chick). Anthropic get a "glorified marketer", and he gets a first row seat at SOTA LLM dev 2026. I don't think they hired him expecting he's going to change the direction/pace of their research.

> That implies Karpathy is either dumb or desperate and he is neither of those by a long shot.

No it implies that he is more valuable for being famous than the hands-on work he can produce. This is the IC endgame

I don’t think it does. I think it’s better phrased that he is marketing rather than a marketer. He can do whatever he wants to do, in return Anthropic gets to say “hey, this guy works with us!”

I don't know anything about this person, but want to point out that renown and validation is something that most (all?) humans crave. That doesn't make them dumb or desperate, it makes them normal.

> https://gist.github.com/karpathy/442a6bf555914893e9891c11519...

Last thing I saw Karpathy talk about was this, which I find hard to believe that it came from a smart person.

Andrej is a smart guy. You don't get into Stanford for grad school without that.

But he has always been known for his communication rather than his research. He got famous by putting out a (very well made) course on machine learning that was available to the public. Since graduating he hasn't exactly delivered on revolutionary new stuff at the businesses that employed him but he has continued to be extremely good at communicating thoughts about the current and future state of AI. Businesses want that and he knows that he can deliver that.

Being a singular influencer in this space, at this time, may be more valuable than a lot of successful VC-backed startups over the last few decades.

i mean he did publicly openly solicit interest to work at a frontier lab so he can be closer to what's going on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwSVtQ7dziU&t=2870s

Greedy is enough. Neither dumb nor desperate needed for this.

Anyone who would voluntarily work for Musk when he went obviously has things going on that aren't great.

expectation: in the real world the CLI will be replaced by an agent prompt and to get to the shell you'll have to ask 'get me bash dammit'

Yes, he was [1] director of AI and Autopilot Vision at Tesla, directly poached and reporting to Elon Musk on the most important headline feature of Tesla directly managed by Elon Musk.

He had both the technical and executive authority to determine if the product was fit for customer usage. He had direct executive responsibility for the product on the road between 2017-2022.

If he, the lead architect and executive responsible felt the product was dangerous and then he was overridden, he can not get away with claiming he was “just following orders”, he had a moral duty to not sign-off or quit otherwise he is clearly complicit in deploying a dangerous product for his own self-enrichment.

When people talk about engineering ethics, this is literally a completely uncontroversial textbook example. The only way you accept this is if you do not want ethics in engineering.

Furthermore, he was extremely hireable with numerous job opportunitys available to him. He would not be destitute or even particularly worse off if he did quit for ethical reasons. Any self-preservation defense is also invalid.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/20/tesla-hires-deep-learning-...

I judge them from a meritocratic lens.

A hyped name means nothing to me, how will Karpathy make Claude Code better?

I’m super happy seeing a small product manager like Tibo fucking crushing it on Codex

I’ve been using Claude and Codex extremely heavily and use adblockers so I don’t see them

Dude, both! Codex is going to eat Openclaw… i don’t love saying that.

What codex is a few steps away from doing is changing fundamentally a lot of workflows.

Remote codex with their computer use is basically you at your computer doing things, 24/7.

Then they added gpt images 2.0

what codex can do, in a few more product iterations, is show you visually side by side “would you prefer this (A) or that (B)” in a series of questions. This is what some open source researchers have been up to. That’s no longer guessing.

I’m not trying to hype a company i have no stake in, but they’ve been killing it.

It’s extremely compute intensive, but also very satisfying.

It just feels like more hype instead of product focus.

Example 1, just from top of my mind, Composer 2.5 released today. Go look at their benchmark.

Composer 2.5 and Opus 4.7 ranked around the same, meanwhile gpt-5.5 was miles ahead.

You wouldn’t have caught me dead using a gpt model 2 years ago

This gave me a good laugh because we don’t know what to think until Jon Blow says, “Here’s the thing.”

You are now my financial advisor

yeah but i don't think there's any large org which is 'good guys'. Anyone who wants to become a monopoly or very very large is probably suffering from some sort of a neural condition (psychosis, if plural) which we will study 100 years from now. Right now they are rewarded but I think our little minds forget to take the negative externalities into account.

I am working on a short story on this topic which is set in 2100s, where most humans have internalized the concept of 'having enough' after the great conflict. But some specimen have started to show signs of this syndrome again, and neuroscientists and psychologists are grappling to understand where it originated from.

100% and that was bold and set a good example, at least from the outside.

> you need incredible amounts of money to be competitive in the frontier model arena

This is my assumption.

> there's the uncertainty, will the AI "wars" be some winner-takes-all situation? Will the smaller labs eventually be acquired by the bigger ones, will they simply wash away if there's a crash?

He's Andrej Karpathy. He could wait to let the winner surface. Obviously better to get in with the winner earlier. But worse to get on the wrong team versus on the right team late.

Apple’s software defects can be comically bad. Software overall though, you may overstate.

The overhead of maintaining and running things isn't interesting to most creative folk. They'd rather others deal with the minutiae (managing a company, etc) so they can focus on their thing.

i can play by myself, or i can join some friends, and make the play more joyful

No, money is not the only barrier to building things. I think karoathy could build his own lab if he wanted, but it would be years of doing things he doesn’t want. Why waste time running a business when he’d rather be researching?

Do you have any idea how much it costs to build a frontier model and how much money it takes to enable R&D at the cutting edge?