Nathaniel (NLW) Whittemore

That's it.

And I find this very accelerating because I know how hard it is to search the literature.

Now, honestly, the substance of this doesn't matter all that much.

What matters is that this dropped into the lap of increasing concern around AI hype exceeding the reality, and so just seemed to many as a tailor-made example of what they're concerned with.

All of this, however, was just prelude to the discourse surrounding OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy's comments on the Dwarkesh podcast, where he pushed back on the AGI timeline, basically broadly saying that a lot of what AI companies are selling just isn't real.

One of the quotes that was most shared, and that spoke to the current anxiety around model development, was when Karpathy said, Overall, these models are not there.

I feel like the industry is making too big of a jump and is trying to pretend like this is amazing, and it's not.

It's slopped.

They're coming to terms with it and maybe they're trying to fundraise or something like that.

I'm not sure what's going on, but we're at this intermediate stage.

These models are amazing, but they still need a lot of work.

He basically took issue with the idea of 2025 or 2026 being the quote year of agents because he thinks that we are at the beginning of the decade of agents.

He commented that while there are already some very early agents that are extremely impressive and that I use daily, Claude and Codex and so on, I feel there's so much work to be done.

My reaction is we'll be working with these things for a decade.

Now the comments were picked up enough that Karpathy felt like he had to add some additional thoughts on Twitter.

He wrote, He actually referred back to a tweet of his from January of this year, where he said, But it should work.

Today, operator can find you lunch on DoorDash or check a hotel, sometimes and maybe.

Tomorrow, you'll spin up organizations of operators for long-running tasks of your choice, e.g.

running a whole company.

You could be a kind of CEO monitoring 10 of them at once, maybe dropping into the trenches sometimes to unblock something, and things will get pretty interesting.