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Comment by pera | Hacker News Reader

Is "Software 3.0" somehow related to "Web 3.0"?

No – for more context you can check out Karpathy's original essay from 2017: https://karpathy.medium.com/software-2-0-a64152b37c35

Pure coincidence, I'm sure :)

No. But it doesn't make any difference that both of them are grifts in different ways.

One bundles "AGI" with broken promises and bullshit claims of "benefits to humanity" and "abundance for all" when at the same time it takes jobs away with the goal of achieving 10% global unemployment in the next 5 years.

The other is an overpromised scam wrapped up in worthless minted "tokens" on a slow blockchain (Ethereum).

Terms like "Software 3.0", "Web 3.0" and even "AGI" are all bullshit.

No, they are totally unrelated. Web 3.0 is blockchain-backed web applications (rather than proprietary server-backed web applications, which is Web 2.0) and Software 3.0 is LLM-powered agents.

They are related in that they are pure marketing buzzwords to build enormous hype around a product, if not a dream.

That does not describe Karpathy’s use of Software 3.0. He is referring to LLM agents with that term, which is agnostic to LLM model, whether third-party-hosted or self-hosted.

What was Software 2.0?

It's using NNs or ML models which are given datasets and learn using those datasets. https://karpathy.medium.com/software-2-0-a64152b37c35

If you read the talk you can find out this and more :)

Early application specific ML models, Software 1.0 is normal programs.

And what was Software 1.0?

Trained Neural Networks.

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