Is Andrej Karpathy Right About Overhyped AI?

Andrej Karpathy, one of the founding members of OpenAI, on Friday threw cold water on the idea that artificial general intelligence is around the corner. He also cast doubt on various assumptions about AI made by the industry’s biggest boosters, such as Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

The highly regarded Karpathy called reinforcement learning—arguably the most important area of research right now—“terrible,” said AI-powered coding agents aren’t as exciting as many people think, and said AI cannot reason about anything it hasn’t already been trained on. While Karpathy isn’t working at OpenAI—or any other AI lab—suffice it to say he probably has a decent pulse on things.

His comments, from a podcast interview with Dwarkesh Patel, struck a chord with some of the AI researchers we talk to, including those who have also worked at OpenAI and Anthropic. They also echoed comments we heard from researchers at the International Conference on Machine Learning earlier this year. 

Karpathy is still incredibly optimistic about the long-term potential of AI and even what it’s able to do today in fields like software engineering (so you shouldn’t take these statements to mean that AI is over, as some users on X have alleged). But his realistic tone stood in contrast to executives at model developers that are raising money and might need to pitch more aggressive timelines for AI that can perform as well as humans on most tasks.