Andrej Karpathy

I do think that self-driving is very interesting because it's definitely like where I get a lot of my intuitions because I spent five years on it.

And it has this entire history where actually the first demos of self-driving go all the way to the 1980s.

You can see a demo from CMU in 1986.

There's a truck that's driving itself on roads.

But OK, fast forward.

I think when I was joining Tesla, I had a very early demo of Waymo.

And it basically gave me a perfect drive in 2014 or something like that.

So perfect Waymo drive a decade ago.

It took us around Palo Alto and so on because I had a friend who worked there.

And I thought it was like very close and then still took a long time.

And I do think that for some kinds of tasks and jobs and so on, there's a very large demo to product gap where the demo is very easy, but the product is very hard.

And it's especially the case in cases like self-driving where the cost of failure is too high, right?

Many industries, tasks, and jobs maybe don't have that property, but when you do have that property, that definitely increases the timelines.

I do think that, for example, in software engineering, I do actually think that that property does exist.

I think for a lot of vibe coding, it doesn't.

But I think if you're writing actual production grade code, I think that property should exist because any mistake actually leads to security vulnerability or something like that.

Millions and hundreds of millions of people's personal social security numbers, etc, get leaked or something like that.

I do think that it is a case that in software, people should be careful.

Kind of like in self-driving.

Like in self-driving, if things go wrong, you might get injury.