4 ms·

Karpathy seemed pretty awed though

by manugo4 8mo ago

clarionbell 8mo ago
He would be among those who lack "healthy inclination to skepticism" in my book. I do not doubt his brilliance. Personally, I think he is more intelligent than I am. But, I do have a distinct feeling that his enthusiasm can overwhelm his critical faculties. Still, that isn't exactly rare in our circles.
- iLoveOncall 8mo ago
  It's not about that, he just will profit financially from pumping AI so he pumps AI, no need to go further.
  - yojat661 8mo ago
    [flagged]
  - stephc_int13 8mo ago
    I have the same feeling. 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 ^^
    - runlaszlorun 8mo ago
      What are his recent missteps? I'll confess I try to ignore industry chatter to a fair degree.
- sdf2erf 8mo ago
  Im gonna go against the grain and say he is an elite expert on some dimensions, but when you take all the characteristics into account (including an understanding of people etc) I conclude that on the whole he is not as intelligent as you think. Its the same reason why a pure technologist can fail spectacularly at developing products that deliver experiences that people want.
  - newyankee 8mo ago
    More like people know where to hype, whom to avoid criticising unless measured etc. I have rarely seen him criticising Elon's vision only approach and that made me skeptical.
    - sdf2erf 8mo ago
      I personally dont believe he is trying to profit off the hype. I believe he is an individual who wants to believe he is a genius and his word is gospel. Being picked by Elon perhaps amplified that too.
    - CamperBob2 8mo ago
      Unfortunately my understanding is that he originated the vision-only approach while at Tesla. As in, he's the one who sold Musk on the idea in the first place. 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.
  - aleph_minus_one 8mo ago
    > Im gonna go against the grain and say he is an elite expert on some dimensions, but when you take all the characteristics into account (including an understanding of people etc) I conclude that on the whole he is not as intelligent as you think. 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)
    - sdf2erf 8mo ago
- Verdex 8mo ago
  I think many serious endeavors would benefit from including a magician. 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.
  - runlaszlorun 8mo ago
    Ha, great analogy.
  - whycome 8mo ago
    CMO?
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- lawn 8mo ago
  Intelligent people are very good at deceiving themselves.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
ayhanfuat 8mo ago
This was his explanation for anyone interested: > 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. https://x.com/karpathy/status/2017442712388309406 https://x.com/karpathy/status/2017442712388309406
- 8mo ago
louiereederson 8mo ago
I think these people are just as prone to behavioral biases as the rest of us. This is not a problem per se, it's just that it is difficult to interpret what is happening right now and what will happen, which creates an overreliance on the opinions of the few people closely involved. I'm sure given the pace of change and the perception that this is history-changing is impacting peoples' judgment. The unusual focus on their opinions can't be helping either. Ideally people are factoring this into their claims and predictions, but it doesn't seem like that's the case all the time.
belter 8mo ago
So was he also with FSD...
dcchambers 8mo ago
To be honest it's pretty embarrassing how he got sucked into the Moltbook hype.
stronglikedan 8mo ago
He's biased. He needed it to be real. He has a vested interest in these sorts of things panning out.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
zx8080 8mo ago
It's just about money.

Karpathy seemed pretty awed though

by manugo4 8mo ago

Karpathy seemed pretty awed though

He would be among those who lack "healthy inclination to skepticism" in my book. I do not doubt his brilliance. Personally, I think he is more intelligent than I am. But, I do have a distinct feeling that his enthusiasm can overwhelm his critical faculties. Still, that isn't exactly rare in our circles.

iLoveOncall 8mo ago
It's not about that, he just will profit financially from pumping AI so he pumps AI, no need to go further.
- yojat661 8mo ago
  [flagged]
- stephc_int13 8mo ago
  I have the same feeling. 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 ^^
  - runlaszlorun 8mo ago
    What are his recent missteps? I'll confess I try to ignore industry chatter to a fair degree.
sdf2erf 8mo ago
Im gonna go against the grain and say he is an elite expert on some dimensions, but when you take all the characteristics into account (including an understanding of people etc) I conclude that on the whole he is not as intelligent as you think. Its the same reason why a pure technologist can fail spectacularly at developing products that deliver experiences that people want.
- newyankee 8mo ago
  More like people know where to hype, whom to avoid criticising unless measured etc. I have rarely seen him criticising Elon's vision only approach and that made me skeptical.
  - sdf2erf 8mo ago
    I personally dont believe he is trying to profit off the hype. I believe he is an individual who wants to believe he is a genius and his word is gospel. Being picked by Elon perhaps amplified that too.
  - CamperBob2 8mo ago
    Unfortunately my understanding is that he originated the vision-only approach while at Tesla. As in, he's the one who sold Musk on the idea in the first place. 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.
- aleph_minus_one 8mo ago
  > Im gonna go against the grain and say he is an elite expert on some dimensions, but when you take all the characteristics into account (including an understanding of people etc) I conclude that on the whole he is not as intelligent as you think. 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)
  - sdf2erf 8mo ago
Verdex 8mo ago
I think many serious endeavors would benefit from including a magician. 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.
- runlaszlorun 8mo ago
  Ha, great analogy.
- whycome 8mo ago
  CMO?
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
lawn 8mo ago
Intelligent people are very good at deceiving themselves.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

ayhanfuat 8mo ago

This was his explanation for anyone interested: > 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. https://x.com/karpathy/status/2017442712388309406 https://x.com/karpathy/status/2017442712388309406

8mo ago

louiereederson 8mo ago

I think these people are just as prone to behavioral biases as the rest of us. This is not a problem per se, it's just that it is difficult to interpret what is happening right now and what will happen, which creates an overreliance on the opinions of the few people closely involved. I'm sure given the pace of change and the perception that this is history-changing is impacting peoples' judgment. The unusual focus on their opinions can't be helping either. Ideally people are factoring this into their claims and predictions, but it doesn't seem like that's the case all the time.

belter 8mo ago

So was he also with FSD...

dcchambers 8mo ago

To be honest it's pretty embarrassing how he got sucked into the Moltbook hype.

stronglikedan 8mo ago

He's biased. He needed it to be real. He has a vested interest in these sorts of things panning out.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

zx8080 8mo ago

It's just about money.