Andrej Karpathy — “We’re summoning ghosts, not building animals”

The Andrej Karpathy episode. During this interview, Andrej explains why reinforcement learning is terrible (but everything else is much worse), why AGI will just blend into the previous ~2.5 centuries of 2% GDP growth, why self driving took so long to crack, and what he sees as the future of education. It was a pleasure chatting with him. 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒 * Transcript: https://dwarkesh.substack.com/p/andrej-karpathy * Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/andrej-karpathy-agi-is-still-a-decade-away/id1516093381?i=1000732326311 * Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3iIYVmmhXwh3fOumypWVpC?si=33d37708b2b44e2f 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 * Labelbox helps you get data that is more detailed, more accurate, and higher signal than you could get by default, no matter your domain or training paradigm. Reach out today at https://labelbox.com/dwarkesh * Mercury helps you run your business better. It’s the banking platform we use for the podcast — we love that we can see our accounts, cash flows, AR, and AP all in one place. Apply online in minutes at https://mercury.com * Google’s Veo 3.1 update is a notable improvement to an already great model. Veo 3.1’s generations are more coherent and the audio is even higher-quality. If you have a Google AI Pro or Ultra plan, you can try it in Gemini today by visiting https://gemini.google To sponsor a future episode, visit https://dwarkesh.com/advertise 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 00:00:00 – AGI is still a decade away 00:30:33 – LLM cognitive deficits 00:40:53 – RL is terrible 00:50:26 – How do humans learn? 01:07:13 – AGI will blend into 2% GDP growth 01:18:24 – ASI 01:33:38 – Evolution of intelligence & culture 01:43:43 - Why self driving took so long 01:57:08 - Future of education