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Dwarkesh Podcast / episode intelligence

Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away

17 Oct 2025 47 published claims 2 attributable people
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Speakers in the public record

Andrej KarpathyDwarkesh Patel

Claim mix

belief 21evaluation 7prediction 6uncertainty 5observation 3commitment 3recommendation 2

Evidence policy

Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.

Claim ledger

The useful parts, with receipts.

47 published records

05 / belief

I am betting a bit implicitly on some of the timelessness of human nature. It will be desirable to do all these things, and I think people will look up to it as they have for millennia.

“I am betting a bit implicitly on some of the timelessness of human nature. It will be desirable to do all these things, and I think people will look up to it as they have for millennia.”
Speaker
Andrej Karpathy
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

07 / belief

I still think you’re presupposing some discrete jump that has no historical precedent that I can’t find in any of the statistics and that I think probably won’t happen.

“I still think you’re presupposing some discrete jump that has no historical precedent that I can’t find in any of the statistics and that I think probably won’t happen.”
Speaker
Andrej Karpathy
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

08 / belief

You just take all the course materials and then I think you could serve a very good automated TA for the student when they have more basic questions or something like that.

“You just take all the course materials and then I think you could serve a very good automated TA for the student when they have more basic questions or something like that.”
Speaker
Andrej Karpathy
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

09 / belief

I think you’re basically inventing college from first principles for the tools that are available today and just selecting for people who have the motivation and the interest of really engaging with material.

“I think you’re basically inventing college from first principles for the tools that are available today and just selecting for people who have the motivation and the interest of really engaging with material.”
Speaker
Dwarkesh Patel
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

11 / belief

Just to throw the opposite argument against you, my expectation is that it blows up because I think true AGI—and I’m not talking about LLM coding bots, I’m talking about actual replacement of a human in a server—is qualitatively different from these other productivity-improving technologies because it’s labor itself.

“Just to throw the opposite argument against you, my expectation is that it blows up because I think true AGI—and I’m not talking about LLM coding bots, I’m talking about actual replacement of a human in a server—is qualitatively different from these other productivity-improving technologies because it’s labor itself.”
Speaker
Dwarkesh Patel
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

12 / observation

The way to synchronize gradients between them is to use a Distributed Data Parallel container of PyTorch, which automatically as you’re doing the backward, it will start communicating and synchronizing gradients.

“The way to synchronize gradients between them is to use a Distributed Data Parallel container of PyTorch, which automatically as you’re doing the backward, it will start communicating and synchronizing gradients.”
Speaker
Andrej Karpathy
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

13 / belief

There’s a lot of really smart people who are ready to make use of the resources and do this period of catch-up because we’ve had this discontinuity, and I think AI might be similar.

“There’s a lot of really smart people who are ready to make use of the resources and do this period of catch-up because we’ve had this discontinuity, and I think AI might be similar.”
Speaker
Dwarkesh Patel
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

16 / uncertainty

Then adults are somewhere in between, where they don’t have the flexibility of childhood learning, but they can memorize facts and information in a way that is harder for kids. I don’t know if there’s something interesting about that spectrum.

“Then adults are somewhere in between, where they don’t have the flexibility of childhood learning, but they can memorize facts and information in a way that is harder for kids. I don’t know if there’s something interesting about that spectrum.”
Speaker
Dwarkesh Patel
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

18 / belief

One example that’s prominently in my mind, this was probably public, if you’re using an LLM judge for a reward, you just give it a solution from a student and ask it if the student did well or not.

“One example that’s prominently in my mind, this was probably public, if you’re using an LLM judge for a reward, you just give it a solution from a student and ask it if the student did well or not.”
Speaker
Andrej Karpathy
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

23 / observation

If you buy the Sutton perspective that the crux of intelligence is animal intelligence… The quote he said is “If you got to the squirrel, you’d be most of the way to AGI.

“If you buy the Sutton perspective that the crux of intelligence is animal intelligence… The quote he said is “If you got to the squirrel, you’d be most of the way to AGI.”
Speaker
Dwarkesh Patel
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

27 / uncertainty

We’re really far into a territory where I don’t know what this looks like, but if I were to write sci-fi novels, they would look along the lines of not even a single entity that takes over everything, but multiple competing entities that gradually become more and more autonomous.

“We’re really far into a territory where I don’t know what this looks like, but if I were to write sci-fi novels, they would look along the lines of not even a single entity that takes over everything, but multiple competing entities that gradually become more and more autonomous.”
Speaker
Andrej Karpathy
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

32 / belief

Even the early iPhone didn’t have the App Store, and it didn’t have a lot of the bells and whistles that the modern iPhone has. So even though we think of 2008, when the iPhone came out, as this major seismic change, it’s actually not.

“Even the early iPhone didn’t have the App Store, and it didn’t have a lot of the bells and whistles that the modern iPhone has. So even though we think of 2008, when the iPhone came out, as this major seismic change, it’s actually not.”
Speaker
Andrej Karpathy
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

38 / evaluation

The paper that blew my mind was InstructGPT, because it pointed out that you can take the pretrained model, which is autocomplete, and if you just fine-tune it on text that looks like conversations, the model will very rapidly adapt to become very conversational, and it keeps all the knowledge from pre-training.

“The paper that blew my mind was InstructGPT, because it pointed out that you can take the pretrained model, which is autocomplete, and if you just fine-tune it on text that looks like conversations, the model will very rapidly adapt to become very conversational, and it keeps all the knowledge from pre-training.”
Speaker
Andrej Karpathy
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

40 / evaluation

Just a lot of it. So maybe one way to think about it, I don’t know if this is the best way, but I almost feel like — again, making these analogies imperfect as they are — we’ve stumbled by with the transformer neural network, which is extremely powerful, very general.

“Just a lot of it. So maybe one way to think about it, I don’t know if this is the best way, but I almost feel like — again, making these analogies imperfect as they are — we’ve stumbled by with the transformer neural network, which is extremely powerful, very general.”
Speaker
Andrej Karpathy
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

41 / evaluation

” The Atari deep reinforcement learning shift in 2013 or so was part of that early effort of agents, in my mind, because it was an attempt to try to get agents that not just perceive the world, but also take actions and interact and get rewards from environments.

“” The Atari deep reinforcement learning shift in 2013 or so was part of that early effort of agents, in my mind, because it was an attempt to try to get agents that not just perceive the world, but also take actions and interact and get rewards from environments.”
Speaker
Andrej Karpathy
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

42 / evaluation

In fact, I think the paper was even stronger because they hardcoded the weights of a neural network to do gradient descent through attention and all the internals of the neural network.

“In fact, I think the paper was even stronger because they hardcoded the weights of a neural network to do gradient descent through attention and all the internals of the neural network.”
Speaker
Andrej Karpathy
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

46 / recommendation

I have a whole rant on how everyone should learn physics in early school education because early school education is not about accumulating knowledge or memory for tasks later in the industry.

“I have a whole rant on how everyone should learn physics in early school education because early school education is not about accumulating knowledge or memory for tasks later in the industry.”
Speaker
Andrej Karpathy
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast
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