Nathaniel (NLW) Whittemore

The point is I think that Andre was a little surprised at how much people picked up on his comments given that he's been saying them all year.

He continued in his more recent tweet, basically, my AI timelines are about five to 10 times more pessimistic with regard to what you'll find in your neighborhood at San Francisco AI house party or on your Twitter timeline, but still quite optimistic with regard to a rising tide of AI deniers and skeptics.

The apparent conflict is not, in my opinion, we simultaneously, one, saw a huge amount of progress in recent years with LLMs, while two, there is still a lot of work remaining and also research to get done before we have an entity that you'd prefer to hire over a person for an arbitrary job in the world.

I think that overall, 10 years should otherwise be a very bullish timeline for AGI.

It's only in contrast to present hype that it doesn't feel that way.

And it's really hard to overstate, if you are not on AI Twitter, just how much this dominated the conversation all weekend.

You had just about a million tweets like this one from TradeFox CEO PJ who says, If this Carpathy interview doesn't pop the AI bubble, nothing will.

10 brutal quotes.

And then goes through and gives those quotes.

And there was enough of this that I think it's really worth digging into.

Both, yes, as representative of the moment that we're in, indexed as we are towards fear, and also just on their own terms.

First of all, it's important to understand why people respond so strongly to Karpathy.

In short, they feel like he's not selling them something.

Anyone from the labs or who makes money off AI has to have an agenda, right?

Karpathy, on the other hand, has already got money, gobs of it.

He doesn't have any particular project that he's trying to push on us.

And frankly, I think this is a reasonable reason to be excited about what he has to say.

It's a reasonable grain of salt to understand everyone's incentives when they're talking about AI.

Labs need to get you excited to keep fundraising going.

Even critics build their media business around being critics and make lots of money off of the sponsorships for their media or their speaking gigs that they get for being that loud critical voice.