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Andrej Karpathy quote, Oct 17, 2025

Founder, Eureka Labs · Oct 17, 2025 · Interview, Dwarkesh Podcast: AGI is still a decade away

We’re building ghosts or spirits or whatever people want to call it, because we’re not doing training by evolution. We’re doing training by imitation of humans and the data that they’ve put on the Internet.

Primary source

Words found on the source page on Sep 25, 2026.

More from Andrej Karpathy

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And I've vibe coded entire ephemeral apps just to find a single bug because why not - code is suddenly free, ephemeral, malleable, discardable after single use. Vibe coding will terraform software and alter job descriptions.Dec 19, 2025· Post
Anthropic got this order of precedence correct and packaged CC into a delightful, minimal CLI form factor that changed what AI looks like - it's not just a website you go to like Google, it's a little spirit/ghost that "lives" on your computer.Dec 19, 2025· Post
LLMs are emerging as a new kind of intelligence, simultaneously a lot smarter than I expected and a lot dumber than I expected.Dec 19, 2025· Post
Training on the test set is a new art form. What does it look like to crush all the benchmarks but still not get AGI?Dec 19, 2025· Post
We're not "evolving/growing animals", we are "summoning ghosts".Dec 19, 2025· Post
Software 1.0 easily automates what you can specify. Software 2.0 easily automates what you can verify.Nov 17, 2025· Post
The more a task/job is verifiable, the more amenable it is to automation in the new programming paradigm.Nov 17, 2025· Post
I do, but it’s business as usual because we’re in an intelligence explosion already and have been for decades.Oct 17, 2025· Interview
If you talk to a billion parameter model, I think in 20 years, you can have a very productive conversation.Oct 17, 2025· Interview
In my mind, education is the very difficult technical process of building ramps to knowledge.Oct 17, 2025· Interview
In my mind, this is more accurately described as the decade of agents.Oct 17, 2025· Interview
Reinforcement learning is a lot worse than I think the average person thinks.Oct 17, 2025· Interview
The reason you don’t do it today is because they just don’t work.Oct 17, 2025· Interview
The way I like to put it is you’re sucking supervision through a straw.Oct 17, 2025· Interview
What takes the long amount of time and the way to think about it is that it’s a march of nines.Oct 17, 2025· Interview
As far as I can tell, the average person has never experienced a technological unlock this dramatic, this fast.Apr 7, 2025· Post
Mary, Jim and Joes are experiencing the majority of the benefit, not Google or the government of the United States.Apr 7, 2025· Post
So it strikes me as quite unique and remarkable that LLMs display a dramatic reversal of this pattern - they generate disproportionate benefit for regular people, while their impact is a lot more muted and lagging in corporations and governments.Apr 7, 2025· Post

On the same topics

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An AI with more real layers can actually be “smarter” in the conventional sense of the term.Scott AlexanderSep 24, 2026· Post
For 100 steps in a row, the AI can shoot delicate subtle ideas from layer to layer at the speed of light. Then there’s one step where it has to encode them into twenty-six glyphs invented by Phoenician turquoise miners in 1800 BC. Then it has to re-encode the Phoenician glyphs into delicate subtle lightspeed ideas before it can do anything else.Scott AlexanderSep 24, 2026· Post
The science of reading these thoughts is a subfield of AI interpretability, which is still in its infancy.Scott AlexanderSep 24, 2026· Post
This trains the AIs to be focused on task success, which naturally risks including things like reward-hacking, cheating, and single-minded pursuit of stated goals at the expense of ethical injunctions.Scott AlexanderSep 23, 2026· Post
It is important to not confuse massive steps in inference-time scaling, a dynamic which should be fairly predictable, with being the outputs of RSI, which is highly uncertain.Nathan LambertSep 19, 2026· Post
If you have five hours, you’re probably going to do a lot better. The AI models are pretty similar.Noam BrownSep 17, 2026· Interview
About this quote
Said by
Andrej Karpathy, Founder, Eureka Labs
Where
Dwarkesh Podcast: AGI is still a decade away
Topics
Research, Data
Company
Eureka Labs
Source
dwarkesh.com/p/andrej-karpathy

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