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.

Just because something is not ground breaking that doesn't mean that technology path isn't valuable.

Those projects are a complete joke. Neither of them were even original, people have been playing around with those ideas for well over a year.

They just became "famous" because Karpathy is effectively an AI celebrity, so he could throw shit at a wall and post it on X and it would get 10k Github stars.

But seriously, people have been using the models to tweak hyperparemeters, or using LLMs to help create a second brain using markdown or json files or 100X other combinations of files, for a long time already.

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 (rich old guy marries hot young chick). Anthropic get a "glorified marketer", and he gets a front 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.

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.

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.

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

he's not dumb or desperate compared to the average person, but it's very possible to be dumb and desperate compared to the delusional promises and outsized amounts of money in the industry. Manages to make smart people look extremely stupid every day.

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'

> It is a pity we don't hear more about the truly brilliant researchers.

Reason? What is the value of that other than entertainment? And it's not in the interest of companies to make celebrities that then are poach targets (if they can avoid they would yes there are exceptions as noted elsewhere in this thread).

And if you did 'hear' (via articles) to what extent what was said even be correct vs. a writer just fluffing things up to the max.

Tech is not sports where you can actually see the superlatives and know that the person who praise is being lavished on actually won or threw or caught and so on. (Or even music where you can hear it and see the stadium that is packed with fans..)

I was never convinced by the "vision only" approach - I don't see the point of throwing out or refusing to have additional data from other sensors.

I suppose that with modern ML they can just toss it in the blender and reap the benefits ...

Who surpassed Tesla that doesn't operate in some very limited region?

I judge them from a meritocratic lens.

I’m hoping Karpathy will make Claude Code better, in the meantime I’m super happy seeing a small product manager like Tibo fucking crushing it on Codex

To be fair, Mythos is probably one of the most significant marketing pushes in the industry in both impact and investment.

I am sure there is an element of reality in it's capabilities, but there's also a significant amount of "We don't have the compute to handle this at scale", and "look look, we have the best model. It's so good that you can't even compare it to other models. That is how good we are."

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

Anthropic as well. The private equity partnerships for guaranteed users are going to make their numbers look great.

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

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-...