Home Speakers Andrej Karpathy Quote 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.
Words found on the source page on Nov 6, 2026.
More from Andrej Karpathy Blog 2025 LLM Year in Review Dec 19, 2025
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. Blog 2025 LLM Year in Review Dec 19, 2025
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. Blog 2025 LLM Year in Review Dec 19, 2025
LLMs are emerging as a new kind of intelligence, simultaneously a lot smarter than I expected and a lot dumber than I expected. Blog 2025 LLM Year in Review Dec 19, 2025
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? Blog 2025 LLM Year in Review Dec 19, 2025
We're not "evolving/growing animals", we are "summoning ghosts". Blog Verifiability Nov 17, 2025
Software 1.0 easily automates what you can specify. Software 2.0 easily automates what you can verify. Blog Verifiability Nov 17, 2025
The more a task/job is verifiable, the more amenable it is to automation in the new programming paradigm. Podcast Dwarkesh Podcast: AGI is still a decade away Oct 17, 2025
I do, but it’s business as usual because we’re in an intelligence explosion already and have been for decades. Podcast Dwarkesh Podcast: AGI is still a decade away Oct 17, 2025
If you talk to a billion parameter model, I think in 20 years, you can have a very productive conversation. Podcast Dwarkesh Podcast: AGI is still a decade away Oct 17, 2025
In my mind, education is the very difficult technical process of building ramps to knowledge. Podcast Dwarkesh Podcast: AGI is still a decade away Oct 17, 2025
In my mind, this is more accurately described as the decade of agents. Podcast Dwarkesh Podcast: AGI is still a decade away Oct 17, 2025
Reinforcement learning is a lot worse than I think the average person thinks. Podcast Dwarkesh Podcast: AGI is still a decade away Oct 17, 2025
The reason you don’t do it today is because they just don’t work. Podcast Dwarkesh Podcast: AGI is still a decade away Oct 17, 2025
The way I like to put it is you’re sucking supervision through a straw. Podcast Dwarkesh Podcast: AGI is still a decade away Oct 17, 2025
What takes the long amount of time and the way to think about it is that it’s a march of nines. Blog Power to the people: How LLMs flip the script on technology diffusion Apr 7, 2025
As far as I can tell, the average person has never experienced a technological unlock this dramatic, this fast. Blog Power to the people: How LLMs flip the script on technology diffusion Apr 7, 2025
Mary, Jim and Joes are experiencing the majority of the benefit, not Google or the government of the United States. Blog Power to the people: How LLMs flip the script on technology diffusion Apr 7, 2025
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.
On the same topics Blog The Specter Of Neuralese Sep 24, 2026
An AI with more real layers can actually be “smarter” in the conventional sense of the term. Blog The Specter Of Neuralese Sep 24, 2026
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. Blog The Specter Of Neuralese Sep 24, 2026
The science of reading these thoughts is a subfield of AI interpretability, which is still in its infancy. Blog Mysteries Of AI Generalization Sep 23, 2026
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. Blog Why I still haven't bought into true RSI Sep 19, 2026
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. Podcast Dwarkesh Podcast: Agent swarms, alignment, and recursive self-improvement Sep 17, 2026
If you have five hours, you’re probably going to do a lot better. The AI models are pretty similar. About this quote 
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