🎥 Software in the era of AI 🧠
Summary of Andrej Karpathy’s lecture.
💡Main Thesis
We’re not in the “year of agents”, we’re in the decade of agents.
Karpathy walks us through a historical arc showing how software is evolving and why we’re at the beginning of a major transformation.
📜The Software Evolution Story
Software is transitioning across three paradigms:
- Software 1.0 – 👨💻 Code programs the computer
- Software 2.0 – 🧠 Weights program the neural net
- Software 3.0 – ✍️ Prompts program the LLM
We’re now literally programming in English.
The same shift that replaced Tesla’s C++ Autopilot stack is happening everywhere.
➡️ Software 3.0 will begin to absorb existing codebases, but engineers must still be fluent in all three paradigms.
🕰️Where We Are in History
Karpathy compares our moment to the 1950s–70s timesharing era. Like early computers, today’s models are centralized:
- 💰 Expensive, centralized compute
- ☁️ Model (OS) runs in the cloud
- 🌐 I/O is streamed over the network
- ⏱️ Compute batched across users
🖥️ Chat is the terminal.
🖱️ The GUI hasn’t been invented yet.
🔄The Triple Nature of LLMs
LLMs are strange hybrids: they simultaneously resemble:
🔌 Utilities
- Massive CAPEX to train
- Ongoing OPEX to serve intelligence
- Metered access ($ per 1M tokens)
🏭 Fabs
- R&D-intensive
- Secretive IP
- Some companies are fabless (use NVIDIA), others own the fab (e.g., Google, Amazon)
💻 Operating Systems
- Growing software ecosystems
- Switching friction (different features)
- Distinct system/user space layers
🧠LLMs are Savants, with Cognitive Faults
LLMs = “Stochastic simulations of people” 🤯
They’re superhuman in bursts, but still very flawed:
⚠️ Hallucinate
⚠️ Jagged intelligence (e.g., thinks 9.11 > 9.9)
⚠️ No long-term memory (anterograde amnesia)
⚠️ Vulnerable to prompt injection
They’re like fallible “people spirits” we’re learning to collaborate with.
🛠️
What Actually Wins?
🏆 Apps with partial autonomy: the “Cursor for X” model.
What makes Cursor powerful is its tight Generation ↔ Verification loop, supported by:
- 🖱️ Manual UI for human control
- 🤖 Context packaging by AI
- 👀 GUI for visual diff & audit
- 🎚️ Adjustable autonomy:
Tab → Cmd+K → Cmd+L → full background agent mode
🦾The Iron Man Analogy
The Iron Man suit = Agent + Augmentation.
It can act autonomously but is most effective when paired with Tony Stark.
➡️ The future lies in tight human–AI feedback loops, where autonomy is adjustable, and humans stay in control while AI augments their abilities.
Crepi il lupo! 🐺