kooi 6 minutes ago

The 1%ers are in the vertical, but the question is vertical to where?

It needs to a potential field with practical, economical, "real life" attraction well. I.e, robotics, real economic efficiency gains, manufacturing novelties.

The worry is that the 1% is attracted towards a non-practical money hole. I.e: Token burn for the lols, sophisticated software systems that dont provide actual value outside of giving NVIDIA cash.

mccoyb 38 minutes ago

If the software coming out of OpenAI and Anthropic is what we have to judge, I wonder about the 5000 ...

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that the models are some multiplicative factor better on the inside.

Doesn't that mean the demos should work?

spiderice 30 minutes ago

I'm confused.. are you suggesting that Claude Code / Codex don't work? Because if you're still saying that in October 2026, it's a you problem. You're doing something wrong.

mccoyb 22 minutes ago

No, I’m talking about the recent DevDay.

Also, yes there are still bugs in Claude Code. I experience them nearly everyday.

It is markedly better than early days, but still not the best harness.

The best software written with agents seems to come from people outside of the labs (see pi, for instance — or all of cloudflare’s recent work)

Which makes me question either the model, or the holders …

nullpoint420 6 minutes ago

Cloudflare is where you lost me. I don't know anyone actually using them other than for their proxy, DNS servers, or DDOS protection.

mccoyb 2 minutes ago

See, for instance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49182996 by Kenton Varda

Also, not mentioned in my post:

- Mitchell Hashimoto

- Prime Intellect (and all their agent experiments)

- Geoff Huntley (see Jiti, for instance)

There's a ton of interesting software being developed with these models, but I find most of the software from these big guys to be ... bland. Buggy copies of copies.

j2kun 28 minutes ago

Unfortunately, marketing, hype, and venture capital overshadows any serious public discussion of capabilities.

AndrewKemendo 19 minutes ago

Be the change you wanna see in the world: Attend or host an AGI society event to have that conversation

LastTrain 21 minutes ago

It’s like the aliens paradox. If AI can build killer software already, where is it?

equinumerous 13 minutes ago

Couldn't agree more. I find a new bug in the VSCode Codex extension every day... quantity != quality!

SoKamil 2 minutes ago

ArtCraft suite built in 2 weeks I guess.

comeonbro 20 minutes ago

I would propose another mechanism: even the free-tier models have already completely saturated what most people are capable of appreciating.

gammarator 16 minutes ago

Or maybe needing.

ilovecake1984 7 minutes ago

I’ll say this until I am blue one the face. Nerds (software dev, maths etc) see how good LLMs are at things they care about and assume they will be broadly applicable in future.

There’s no reason to think this.

majkinetor 3 minutes ago

There is every reason to think this. Its about available quality data. The data that was easiest to fetch was already there, then we got some more data by asking experts to create datasets for post training. Once this is over, we will get to the outer world that didn't get to hoard it for bots to take it. This will certainly change. Put on a smart glasses and record what you do to fix a pipe. In 3-5 years, rinse and repeat.

tripleee 7 minutes ago

He's intentionally forgoing all nuance in order to make this sound dramatic

> Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt.

No, they can't, at least not any semblance of quality. The cases we're seeing where this does kinda work is in ports and translation where all the rules are already documented in the best specification language possible with a way for the LLM to verify itself: code. We saw this close to a year ago now with Cloudflare and NextJS

> The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about

These are operating on different capabilities - AI's ability to answer informational queries as a chatbot frankly sucks and can't be trusted without verifying it. I run up against this every day. A problem with a verifiable answer on the other hand it's very good at solving. He knows this (his next paragraph) but he's putting them on the same scale of "stressing the system" to attempt to add proof to his introductory claim

frereubu 9 minutes ago

https://xxcancel.com/karpathy/status/2109361546505966046

freecodeio 7 minutes ago

thanks mate

weinzierl 41 minutes ago

Most people see a clumsy chatbot, most professionals see modest gains, and a tiny group is watching the curve go vertical, all at once.

The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed.

lifeisloving 37 minutes ago

I use models all day everyday, have unlimited access to all models. The curve is not going "verticle". I have all the workflows and meta agentic tooling, im not holding it wrong. Its bad, not everything is a 20th percentile problem.

There is in fact no indication of this, not evem the precious benchmaxxed benchmarks ya'll love to reference.

There is however a exponential curve of slop, and an ever increasing number of peoples who's minds are completely captured by these things.

tkz1312 6 minutes ago

As someone who has done software verification professionally for many years the last 6 months or so have looked extremely vertical. The robots are better proof authors than I probably ever could be even if I dedicated the rest of my days to the practice, and projects that once would have taken months now take a day or two.

gr_norm 2 minutes ago

I believe this, but it is also a unique case where the pitfalls of LLMs (producing weird errors that a human wouldn't) are zeroed out. Since you have a proof checker that tells you if the LLM did it right.

atmavatar 27 minutes ago

> a tiny group is watching the curve go vertical

Caveat: that same tiny group is employed by the AI vendors, meaning it's in their financial best interest to make it sound like the curve is going vertical.

njovin 19 minutes ago

Another caveat: many of that same group seem to have a shared delusion that they’re birthing a super intelligence, and those are the same ones claiming the vertical curve.

Arkhaine_kupo 17 minutes ago

Down is a perfectly valid direction for a vertical line when not given a ± in the vector.

Considering the investment in AI, the lack of moat, and the increased inability of any of the big players to come even close to profitability (with OpenAI already breaking the "ads" emergency glass option)... perhaps he meant a tiny group is already seeing the line crater

nullpoint420 5 minutes ago

I hate to say it but this is cope. I believed this in the past but it's over.

AI models can dismantle billion dollar industries. They can reverse engineer Adobe and Microsoft products that once were their moats and titans of their industry.

Why do you think they'd need to lie?

albatross79 15 minutes ago

Congratulations, you've parroted something said by someone else.

AvAn12 12 minutes ago

Fair assessment. Maybe the messaging should focus on “these are great accelerators for software developers” rather than “AI will change everything for everyone everywhere…” It is understandable that non-technical folks are kind of underwhelmed - not due to lack of understanding so much as lack of a tangible need. Not everyone needs an electron microscope or gas chromatograph…

freecodeio 2 minutes ago

I don't understand how "swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects" works with the current context limits and at this point I'm too afraid to ask cause I'm afraid an AI bro is gonna punch me.

anukin 16 minutes ago

Tbh building an agent swarm and the coordination layer is not exactly frontier level. They don’t achieve any meaningful outcome rather than producing pr puff pieces. Hacking huggingface and Australian govt etc is very much possible with a team of humans and agents and does not need agent swarms. The cost is also lower.

m101 24 minutes ago

My interpretation of this is something like: if LLMs are to be mega useful token counts need to increase by many orders of magnitude -> broad adoption (and spending) would require token costs to drop by many orders of magnitude -> before the common folk get mega useful tools existing GPUs will be worthless

ashleyn 32 minutes ago

>Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while.

Amid all the discussion of sigmoid curves, and where the "LLM wall" will materialise, I think few people would have predicted that the real wall in LLMs would end up being humans' capacity to verify the output.

What I fear is that people simply eschew human review altogether, considering we're talking about the industry that came up with the "move fast and break things" credo. Human review of LLM-produced code where I work is already a farce, and we're not special enough to be one of Karpathy's 5,000. I do my best to manually review anything that's my responsibility, but I'm literally one of very few people left working on my team, so in practice what happens is I submit PRs that are at best glossed over by completely unrelated teams for security, malware/prompt injection, and other serious concerns. Quality insofar as vetting others' code has completely gone out the window and it shows in the number of bug reports that come back, often themselves written in Claudease. This is all on top of everyone cynically phoning it in in the first place, due to the omnipresent sword of Damocles that is additional AI-driven layoffs.

Worse yet all the incentives point to this being the most economically viable thing individual companies can do. I think it goes without saying some type of regulation here is urgently needed, and that an unexpected cause of an AI bubble pop may end up being that humans simply aren't able to keep up with the pace of the output - leading either to precautionary plateauing of capability, or major liability risks related to a decline in quality.

michaelchisari 27 minutes ago

| few people would have predicted that the real wall in LLMs would end up being humans' capacity to verify the output

That was the dominant concern in the circles I’m in, so it’s worrisome it’s being treated as rare.

skydhash 11 minutes ago

Humans are not immortal and cannot spend all their time into review (especially unpaid). Even today, there’s so much knowledge around that you have to be specialist of a narrow domain to get to the frontier. Even in computing which is just approaching a century of existence.

skippyboxedhero 14 minutes ago

Text generation is not the bottleneck. Does everyone work for Accenture and TCS?

skybrian 11 minutes ago

> see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt

Really? I start with a conversation for maybe 5 turns or so, where I ask it what would need to change, what the API might be, any database schema changes, URL schemes, and so on, and finally ask it to break it down into commits. Then I let it go, implementing 3-10 commits at a time via subagents. It usually gets the UI somewhat wrong, so there are followups to fix it. This is with Sol and Luna subagents.

Is that what other people see?

andy99 13 minutes ago

> Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind.

I think LLMs are valuable and spend most of my professional life working with them.

I do wonder thought whether there’s a Ponzi scheme aspect here where as long as the “frontier” can keep outrunning human review and comprehension, LLMs are always going to looked way more valuable than they are and the bubble will continue.

This started with deep learning, expectations weren’t met and people started looking for value, then GPT came out and people got wooed again and forgot, then coding, then math, cyber, etc. As long as the dust doesn’t settle we never have to reflect on all the shortcomings and can just stare mesmerized at demos.