{"id":231531,"date":"2025-10-22T03:54:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-22T03:54:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/231531\/"},"modified":"2025-10-22T03:54:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-22T03:54:11","slug":"did-an-openai-cofounder-just-pop-the-ai-bubble-the-models-are-not-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/231531\/","title":{"rendered":"Did an OpenAI cofounder just pop the AI bubble? ‘The models are not there’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andrej Karpathy<\/a>, one of the most influential figures in modern artificial intelligence and a founding member of OpenAI, sent shockwaves through the tech world over the weekend with a sobering assessment of the industry\u2019s progress toward artificial general intelligence (AGI).<\/p>\n

In a widely shared interview<\/a> with podcaster Dwarkesh Patel<\/a>, a YouTuber with over 1 million followers, Karpathy said he believes the race to build AGI is moving significantly slower than the hype suggests.<\/p>\n

Despite rapid advances in large language models (LLMs) over the past three years, he argued AGI remains at least a decade away, and warned that many companies are exaggerating AI\u2019s agentic capabilities in a way that could damage the field.<\/p>\n

\u201cOverall, the models are not there,\u201d Karpathy said on the podcast. \u201cI feel like the industry is making too big of a jump and is trying to pretend like this is amazing, and it\u2019s not. It\u2019s slop.\u201d<\/p>\n

The interview triggered an immediate reaction across the tech community, where expectations for AGI have soared alongside capital investment and competition.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIf this Karpathy interview doesn\u2019t pop the AI bubble, nothing will,\u201d Prithvir Jhaveri, CEO of prediction markets aggregator TradeFox, wrote<\/a> on X<\/a>.<\/p>\n

John Coogan, host of the tech podcast TBPN, noted<\/a> that Karpathy\u2019s interview came just weeks after AI pioneer Richard Sutton called LLMs a \u201cdead end.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe general tech community is experiencing whiplash right now,\u201d Coogan wrote on X.<\/p>\n

Karpathy, who previously served as Tesla\u2019s senior director of AI and helped lead OpenAI in its early years, described his AI timeline as \u201cfive to ten times pessimistic\u201d compared to many public predictions. But he rejected the idea his prediction, that it\u2019ll take a decade to achieve AGI, is gloomy. \u201cTen years,\u201d he wrote<\/a> on X after the interview, \u201cshould otherwise be a very bullish timeline for AGI.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Silicon Valley, it\u2019s a slow projection<\/a>. Sam Altman, Karpathy\u2019s fellow OpenAI co-founder and current CEO, predicts<\/a> artificial intelligence will surpass the intelligence of any human in any specialty by 2030. Elon Musk has predicted that AGI will come either this year or the next.<\/p>\n

Karpathy argued that much of the confusion stems from metrics that give an inflated sense of capability. Public demos, benchmark competitions, chatbot conversations, and code-generation tests tend to reflect narrow optimizations, he said, rather than addressing the hardest unsolved problems in AI. Those include long-horizon planning, structured reasoning and, ultimately, safe system design.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Karpathy reserved his strongest criticism for AI \u201cagents,\u201d a concept that has exploded across the industry in recent months.\u00a0<\/p>\n

These systems, built on top of LLMs, are pitched as autonomous digital workers that can write and run code, search the internet, operate software, and execute business tasks with minimal oversight. Karpathy said the idea is promising, but the execution, at least how it stands today, is far from reliable.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re at this intermediate stage,\u201d Karpathy said. \u201cThe models are amazing. They still need a lot of work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many other AI leaders are much more bullish. For example, Nvidia<\/a> CEO Jensen Huang has called<\/a> 2025 \u201cthe year of AI agents.\u201d Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently said<\/a> that by 2026 or 2027, AI systems will be \u201cbetter than almost all humans at almost all things.\u201d<\/p>\n

But most current AI agent systems produce brittle, unpredictable results and lack basic reliability, Karpathy warned. He argued they do not possess enough reasoning ability, have limited perceptions of software environments, and struggle to use tools correctly.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf this isn\u2019t done well,\u201d Karpathy said, \u201cwe might end up with mountains of slop accumulating across software, and an increase in vulnerabilities [and] security breaches.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, he insisted AI remains on a long but solvable<\/a> path. The technical challenges ahead are difficult, he said, but manageable with time, research, and better safety practices.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like the problems are surmountable,\u201d he said. \u201cBut they\u2019re still difficult.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Andrej Karpathy, one of the most influential figures in modern artificial intelligence and a founding member of OpenAI,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":231532,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,31279,4066,3120,7030,2291,5044,1591,13961,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-231531","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-bubble","14":"tag-bubbles","15":"tag-elon-musk","16":"tag-jensen-huang","17":"tag-nvidia","18":"tag-openai","19":"tag-podcasts","20":"tag-sam-altman","21":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231531\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/231532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}