Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away
Episode publishedPodcast: Dwarkesh PodcastDwarkesh Podcast
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Today, I'm speaking with Andre Karpathy. Andre, why do you say that this will be the decade of agents and not the year of agents?
Mhmm. Well, first of all, thank you for having me here. I'm excited to be here. So the quote that you've just mentioned, it's the decade of agents. That's actually a reaction to an existing preexisting quote, I should say, where I think a lot of some of the labs I'm not actually sure who said this, but they were alluding to this being the year of agents Mhmm. With respect to LLMs and how they were gonna evolve. And I think I was triggered by that because I feel like there's some over predictions going on in the industry. And in my mind, this is really a lot more accurately described as the Dec
Minh, what do you think will take a decade to accomplish? What are the bottlenecks?
Well, actually make it work. So in my mind I mean, when you're talking about an agent, I guess, or what the labs have in mind and what maybe I have in mind as well, is it's you should think of it almost like an employee or like an intern that you would hire to work with you. So for example, you work with some employees here. Yeah. When would you prefer to have an agent like Claude or Codex do that work? Like, currently, of course, can't. What would it take for them to be able to do that? Why don't you do it today? Yeah. And the reason you don't do it today is because they just don't work. So R
Interesting. So, as a professional podcaster and a viewer of AI from afar, It's easy to identify for me, like, oh, here's what's lacking. Continual learning is lacking or multimodality is lacking. But I don't really have a good, way of trying to put a timeline on it. Like, if somebody's like, how long will continual learning take? I there's no, like, prior I have about, like, this is a project that should take five years, ten years, fifty years. Why a decade? Why not one year? Why not fifty years?
Yeah. I guess this is where you get into, like, a bit of a I guess, my own intuition a little bit, and also just kind of doing a bit of an extrapolation of with respect to my own experience in the field. Right? So I guess I've been in AI for almost two decades. I mean, it's gonna be maybe fifteen years or so. Not that long. You had Richard Sutton here who was all around, of course, for much longer. But I do have about fifteen years of experience of people making predictions of seeing how they actually turned out. And also, was in the industry for a while, and I was in research, and I worked in
This is actually quite interesting. I wanna, like, hear not only the history, but what people in the room felt was about to happen at various different breakthrough moments.
Right.
What were the ways in which their feelings were either overly pessimistic or overly optimistic? Yeah. Maybe should we just go through each of them one by one?
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