These days he's moved on to predicting 10 years for AGI and is, I shit you not, citing his 15 year track record of making accurate predictions (timestamped link below if you want have a laugh).
To be fair, if I’m being paid $10 million/year, I’ll make any damn prediction my boss tells me to make
You could tell Andrej was going along with what hiss boss said, but didn't believe it himself.
There's a funny but very crude saying in Slovakia, which where he's from so he might know it, lol. I cannot write it here for obvious reasons but it's related to letting people do things to you for money ...
As others have pointed out, there were a lot of incentives ($$$) for Krapathy to behave like that during his tenure at Tesla.
Even worse? Nah, the judgement of someone in their 20s should be assumed poor.
It’s not “energy” because productivity of older more experienced founders is bound to be higher. Rather, younger inexperienced founders have to compensate for their lower productivity by increased hours.
I’d say overall the risk factor is more important, because married folks with kids have to worry about losing their job and finding another one a lot more. If your spouse isn’t working or is on reduced income, you have to prioritise job safety.
The only way out of that for older founders is to be rich, and that’s an advantage in general no matter the age. In the UK many founders are highly privileged and can take risks because there is little downside for them.
There’s definitely a gap in the market for a VC that invests in experienced founders with more tolerance for moving more slowly but with higher quality results. Deep tech is one area this would work.
People in that age range sometimes have a nice set of traits like youthful self confidence and the energy levels needed to bust their ass and sell, along with the right amount insecurity that will drive them to need to prove themselves. When you combine this with the naivety and inexperience that lets you get a lopsided deal, with your experience that means that doesn’t happen to them after you, you end up in a situation where you can afford to have 10 or 20 duds between each winner. And it’s a lot of fun.
(I definitely like Karpathy 2.0 better though.)
But plenty willing to guess. Folks without domain expertise tend to average the experts' guesses without accounting for the condition of being willing to guess in the first place.
There's also just the reality that most of these experts have a lot of skin in the game, and there's lots of pressure in this world to a true believer, so I'm not going to buy into it too much.
I'm fairly sure what type of sentiment I'd prefer, at least it'd be half-assed then.
Yeah, easy and not very interesting.
You're saying that with a lot of confidence, but the truth is that we don't know if paracetamol might be the cure of cancer, less than we know for sure LLMs "do not even exist within the same plane of intelligence that AGI would".
Almost all discoveries are surprising, and after being discovered looks kind of obvious in hindsight. It just happened to be someone who stumbled over the right way of putting together the right pieces, and boom, something new discovered and invented.
With that said, I personally also don't believe LLMs to be the solution to AGI, but I won't claim with such confidence that they won't be involved in it, would be kind of outlandish to claim something like that this early on.
I've not read any original quote from anyone saying that, either. Closest things I have seen were people doing a game of telephone with Altman's "thousands of days" ending up as that, and the 2027 paper which was predicated on the USA systematically deleting every obstacle rather than vibe-coding a tariff policy and having ICE mass-arrest people building relevant factories, and even then the authors indicated 2027 was on the optimistic side.
- AI CEOs, who require hype to be able to keep hemorrhaging money long enough to... hemorrhage more money
- The poor AI researchers the AI CEOs drag into public to lie in support of their narrative
- People who are not close to the tech, but who are influential in poltiics, finance, podcasts, etc who are wholly convinced by the grifters above - they did a little bit of poking around and saw some smart looking regurgitated boilerplate
- Grifter influencers, entrepreneurs, etc who don't care, they just want to push AI doom or vibe coding dreams for clicks, or sell some shitty AI solutions to companies eager to get in on the hype
The people you don't hear from are the AI researchers who know most of this is bullshit, but they aren't going to go on the record publicly expressing that they don't believe in the tech they're working on, because they like to be employed (and for absurd amounts of money)
Autopilot's first director, Sterling Anderson, was fired because he was not willing to go along with the scam.
Yeah that actually sounds about right!
To be fair, it was a direct decision from Elon due to covid supply chain shortages of radar and ultrasonic sensors. Not from engineers (as is common at Elon companies)
But Andrej deserves some of the blame because he was too busy sucking on the $TSLA stock teat to say anything
It also doesn’t necessarily mean he was a yes man. Often in these situations people spell out their confidence levels plainly and directly to such execs and it just bounces off.
I’m also seeing below people suggesting he could have publicly voiced his concerns, but that probably wasn’t even a legal option for multiple reasons.