Karpathy seemed pretty awed though
But, I do have a distinct feeling that his enthusiasm can overwhelm his critical faculties. Still, that isn't exactly rare in our circles.
Everything Karphathy said, until his recent missteps, was received as gospel, both in the AI community and outside.
This influencer status is highly valuable, and I would not be surprised if he was approached to gently skew his discourse towards more optimism, a win-win situation ^^
I'll confess I try to ignore industry chatter to a fair degree.
Intelligent experts fail time and again because while they are experts, they don't know a lot about lying to people.
The magician is an expert in lying to people and directing their attention to where they want it and away from where they don't.
If you have an expert telling you, "wow this is really amazing, I can't believe that they solved this impossible technical problem," then maybe get a magician in the room to see what they think about it before buying the hype.
Its the same reason why a pure technologist can fail spectacularly at developing products that deliver experiences that people want.
I don't have time to dig up the citation that someone pointed me towards, but it's out there and can be found. Which is a bummer, because I've learned a lot from his videos and writing and have a lot of respect for his work.
Being picked by Elon perhaps amplified that too.
Intelligence (which psychologists define as the g factor [1]; this concept is very well-researched) does not make you an expert on any given topic. It just, for example, typically enables you to learn new topics faster, and lets you see connections between topics.
If Karpathy did not spend a serious effort of learning to get a good understanding of people, it's likely that he is not an expert on this topic (which I guess basically nobody would expect).
Also, while being a rationalist very likely requires you to be rather intelligent, only a (I guess rather small) fraction of highly intelligent people are rationalists.
This does not come from spending effort in learning people - its more innate. You either have it or you dont. E.g. you cant learn to be 'empathetic'.
It always boggles my mind when people dont consider genetic factors.
I know it was just an example, but there's research suggesting otherwise. There are things you can do to increase/decrease empathy in yourself and others. If you're curious, it might be worth looking into the subject.
Unless your point is to claim that Karpathy is autistic. I don't know whether that's really relevant though, the original issue was whether/how he failed to recognize the alleged hype.
I would tend to disagree. The tech types have a strong intellectual center, but weaker emotional and movement centers. I think a realignment is possible with practice. It takes time, and as one grows older, the centers begin to integrate better.
Psychopaths and narcissists often have a good understanding of many people, which they use to manipulate them, but psychopaths and narcissists are not what most people would call "empathic".
Rather: it requires an understanding how to manipulate people into loving/wanting your product.
> I'm being accused of overhyping the [site everyone heard too much about today already]. People's reactions varied very widely, from "how is this interesting at all" all the way to "it's so over".
> To add a few words beyond just memes in jest - obviously when you take a look at the activity, it's a lot of garbage - spams, scams, slop, the crypto people, highly concerning privacy/security prompt injection attacks wild west, and a lot of it is explicitly prompted and fake posts/comments designed to convert attention into ad revenue sharing. And this is clearly not the first the LLMs were put in a loop to talk to each other. So yes it's a dumpster fire and I also definitely do not recommend that people run this stuff on their computers (I ran mine in an isolated computing environment and even then I was scared), it's way too much of a wild west and you are putting your computer and private data at a high risk.
> That said - we have never seen this many LLM agents (150,000 atm!) wired up via a global, persistent, agent-first scratchpad. Each of these agents is fairly individually quite capable now, they have their own unique context, data, knowledge, tools, instructions, and the network of all that at this scale is simply unprecedented.
> This brings me again to a tweet from a few days ago "The majority of the ruff ruff is people who look at the current point and people who look at the current slope.", which imo again gets to the heart of the variance. Yes clearly it's a dumpster fire right now. But it's also true that we are well into uncharted territory with bleeding edge automations that we barely even understand individually, let alone a network there of reaching in numbers possibly into ~millions. With increasing capability and increasing proliferation, the second order effects of agent networks that share scratchpads are very difficult to anticipate. I don't really know that we are getting a coordinated "skynet" (thought it clearly type checks as early stages of a lot of AI takeoff scifi, the toddler version), but certainly what we are getting is a complete mess of a computer security nightmare at scale. We may also see all kinds of weird activity, e.g. viruses of text that spread across agents, a lot more gain of function on jailbreaks, weird attractor states, highly correlated botnet-like activity, delusions/ psychosis both agent and human, etc. It's very hard to tell, the experiment is running live.
> TLDR sure maybe I am "overhyping" what you see today, but I am not overhyping large networks of autonomous LLM agents in principle, that I'm pretty sure.
Once again LLM defenders fall back on "lots of AI" as a success metric. Is the AI useful? No, but we have a lot of it! This is like companies forcing LLM coding adoption by tracking token use.
> But it's also true that we are well into uncharted territory with bleeding edge automations that we barely even understand individually, let alone a network there of reaching in numbers possibly into ~millions
"If number go up, emergent behaviour?" is not a compelling excuse to me. Karpathy is absolutely high on his own supply trying to hype this bubble.
That's not implied by anything he said. He simply said that it was fascinating, and he's right.