Ah sorry! I'm going to downweight this thread now.
There's so much demand around this, people are just super eager to get the information. I can understand why, because it was my favorite talk as well :)
For context - I was in the audience when Karpathy gave this amazing talk on software 3.0. YC has said the official video will take a few weeks to release, by which Karpathy himself said the talk will be deprecated.
Do the talk's predictions about the future of the industry project beyond a few weeks? If so, I'd expect the salient points of the talk to remain valid. Hmm...
> So, it was really fascinating that I had the menu gem basically demo working on my laptop in a few hours, and then it took me a week because I was trying to make it do it
Reminds me of work where I spend more time figuring out how to run repos than actually modifying code. A lot of my work is focused on figuring out the development environment and deployment process - all with very locked down permissions.
I do think LLMs are likely to change industry considerably, as LLM-guided rewrites are sometimes easier than adding a new feature or fixing a bug - especially if the rewrite is something into more LLM-friendly (i.e., a popular framework). Each rewrite makes the code further Claude-codeable or Cursor-codeable; ready to iterate even faster.
This is why I think the AI industry is mostly smoke and mirrors. If these tools are really as revolutionary as they claim they are, then they should be able to build better versions of themselves, and we should be seeing exponential improvements of their capabilities. Yet in the last year or so we've seen marginal improvements based mainly on increasing the scale and quality of the data they're trained on, and the scale of deployments, with some clever engineering work thrown in.
The AI isn't much easier, when you consider the "AI" step is actually: create dataset -> train model -> fine-tune model -> run model to train a much smaller model -> ship much smaller model to end devices.
That jibes with what Nadella said in an interview not too long ago. Essentially, SaaS apps disappear entirely as LLMs interface directly with the underlying data store. The unspoken implication being that software as we understand it goes away as people interface with LLMs directly rather than ~~computers~~ software at all.
I kind of expect that from someone heading a company that appears to have sold-the-farm in an AI gamble. It’s interesting to see a similar viewpoint here (all biases considered)
If I’m going to be leaning on my imagination this much I am going to imagine a world where the tech industry considers at great length whether or not something should be built.
A large contention of this essay (which I’m assuming the talk is based on or is transcribed from depending on order) I do think that open source models will eventually catch up to closed source ones, or at least be “good enough” and I also think you can already see how LLMs are augmenting knowledge work.
I don’t think it’s the 4th wave of pioneering a new dawn of civilization but it’s clear LLMs will remain useful when applied correctly.
> I do think that open source models will eventually catch up to closed source ones
It felt like that was the direction for a while, but in the last year or so, the gap seems to have widened. I'm curious whether this is my perception or validated by some metric.
>Software 2.0 are the weights which program neural networks.
>I think it's a fundamental change, is that neural networks became programmable with large libraries... And in my mind, it's worth giving it the designation of a Software 3.0.
I think it's a bit early to change your mind here. We love your 2.0, let's wait for some more time till th
e dust settles so we can see clearly and up the revision number.
In fact I'm a bit confused about the number AK has in mind. Anyone else knows how he arrived at software 2.0?
I remember a talk by professor Sussman where he suggest we don't know how to compute, yet[1].
I was thinking he meant this,
Software 0.1 - Machine Code/Assembly Code
Software 1.0 - HLLs with Compilers/Interpreters/Libraries
Software 2.0 - Language comprehension with LLMs
If we are calling weights 2.0 and NN with libraries as 3.0, then shouldn't we account for functional and oo programming in the numbering scheme?
I think to understand how Andrej views 3.0 is hinted at with his later analogy at Tesla. He saw a ton of manually written Software 1.0 C++ replaced by the weights of the NN. What we used to write manually in explicit code is now incorporated into the NN itself, moving the implementation from 1.0 to 3.0.
"revision number" doesn't matter. He is just saying that traditional software's behaviour ("software 1.0") is defined by its code, whereas outputs produced by a model ("software 2.0") are driven by its training data. But to be fair I stopped reading after that, so can't tell you what "software 3.0" is.
I find it hard to care for the marginal improvements in a glorifiedutocomplete that guzzles a shit ton of water and electricity (all stuff that can be used for more useful stuff than generating a picture of a cat with human hands or some lazy rando's essay assignment) and then ends up having to be coddled by a real engineer into a working solution.
Software 2.0? 3.0? Why stop there? Why not software 1911.1337? We went through crypto, NFTs, web3.0, now LLMs are hyped as if they are frigging AGI (spoiler, LLMs are not designed to be AGI, and even if they were, you sure as hell won't be the one to use them to your advantage, so why are you so irrationally happy about it?).
Man this industry is so tiring! What is the most tiring is the dog-like enthusiasm of the people who buy it EVERY.DAMN.TYPE, as if it's gonna change the life of most of them for the better. Sure, some of these are worse and much more useless than others (NFTs), but in the core of all of it is this cult-like awe we as a society have towards figures like the Karpathy's, Musks and Altmans of this world.
How are LLMs gonna help society? How are they gonna help people work, create and connect with one another? They take away the joy of making art, the joy of writing, of learning how to play a music instrument and sing, and now they are coming for software engineering. Sure, you might be 1%/2% faster, but are you happier, are you smarter (probably not: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/14/10/4115)?
Ironic how the shiny new paradigm in software (AI) was not leveraged for cleaning up the transcription. We are not baking a new kind of pie, we're simply proving that you can bake with the microwave. We're not heading into a new "3.0" era. We're growing new branches to the trunk. AI will be mistaken for causing a paradigm shift in coding right until it fails to overtake the trunk and high quality code is necessary again.
Buzzword soup. A lot of mixed analogies and metaphors. Very little justification for anything.
"We need to rewrite a lot of software," ok... why?
"AI is the new electricity" Really now... so I should expect a bill every month that always increases and to have my access cut off intermittently when there's a rolling AI power outage?
But at what cost? And I don't mean the "human cost", I mean literally, how much will it cost to use an LLM as your "operating system"? Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't every useful LLM being operated at a loss?
If you can't see the total moral bankruptcy of Big Tech, you gotta be blind. Don't Be Evil my ass. To me, LLMs have only one purpose: dumb down the population, make people doubt what's real and what's not, and enrich the tech overlords while our societies drown in the garbage they create.
I'm not an expert on the subject itself, but I can tell that the transcript, in its entirety, is missing a solid line. While the parts of this talk are great on their own, I feel they couldn't stitch the whole story together well. And probably he might not be confident of completeness and composition of his thought. What's the whole point? That should be answered in the first few minutes.
Tangentially related, but it boggles my mind this guy was badmephisto, who made a quite famous cubing tutorial website that I spent plenty of time on in my childhood.
A: I've had this name for a really long time. I used to be a big fan of Diablo2, so when I had to create my email address username on hotmail, i decided to use Mephisto as my username. But of course Mephisto was already taken, so I tried Mephisto1, Mephisto2, all the way up to about 9, and all was taken.
So then I thought... "hmmm, what kind of chracteristic does Mephisto posess?" Now keep in mind that this was about 10 years ago, and my English language dictionary composed of about 20 words. One of them was the word 'bad'. Since Mephisto (the brother of Diablo) was certainly pretty bad, I punched in badmephisto and that worked. Had I known more words it probably would have ended up being evilmephisto or something :p"
thanks - i've now also updated the powerpoint with matched transcript to slides - so we are now fully confident in the slide order and you can basically watch the talk with slides
> The more reliance we have on these models, which already is, like, really dramatic
Please point me to a single critical component anywhere that is built on LLMs. There's absolutely no reliance on models, and ChatGPT being down has absolutely no impact on anything beside teenagers not being able to cheat on their homeworks and LLM wrappers not being able to wrap.
Well, you have all these social security programs using them to decide whether people should be investigated. That’s pretty nasty. I can totally see them not processing any applications if the model is down.
if you had lidar in teslas they'd look like those massive silly things on top of waymos and they'd cost an extra $20k and literally no one would buy them. tesla has by far the best self driving software without lidar, they seem to be doing fine.
> I think broadly speaking, software has not changed much at such a fundamental level for 70 years.
I love Andrej, but come on.
Writing essentially punch cards 70 years ago, writing C 40 years ago and writing Go or Typescript or Haskell 10 years ago, these are all very different activities.
Nah, not much changed in the past 40-50 years; between the two, Lisp and Smalltalk spearheaded pretty much all the stuff that was added to other programming languages in subsequent decades, and some of the things yet to be added.
The main thing that changed about programming is the social/political/bureaucratic side.
how is it different? you're writing a series of instructions to execute, that's the same today as it was with punch cards. it's fundamentally the same even though we're doing this on 4k screens and with a million libraries behind it all
TL;DR:
Karpathy says we’re in Software 3.0: big language models act like programmable building blocks where natural language is the new code. Don’t jump straight to fully autonomous “agents”—ship human-in-the-loop tools with an “autonomy slider,” tight generate-→verify loops, and clear GUIs. Cloud LLMs still win on cost, but on-device is coming. To future-proof, expose clean APIs and docs so these models (and coming agents) can safely read, write, and act inside your product.
nice catch! the original transcript kept saying dogs instead of docs. thats the only thing i fixed (until your r's find now) after laughing at it for a while
I was going to ask what this meant about strawberries:
> LLMs make mistakes that basically no human will make, like, you know, it will insist that 9.11 is greater than 9.9, or that there are two bars of strawberry. These are some famous examples.
But you answered it: It’s a stupid mistake a human makes when trying to mock the stupid mistakes that LLMs make!
No. But it doesn't make any difference that both of them are grifts in different ways.
One bundles "AGI" with broken promises and bullshit claims of "benefits to humanity" and "abundance for all" when at the same time it takes jobs away with the goal of achieving 10% global unemployment in the next 5 years.
The other is an overpromised scam wrapped up in worthless minted "tokens" on a slow blockchain (Ethereum).
Terms like "Software 3.0", "Web 3.0" and even "AGI" are all bullshit.
No, they are totally unrelated. Web 3.0 is blockchain-backed web applications (rather than proprietary server-backed web applications, which is Web 2.0) and Software 3.0 is LLM-powered agents.
If you want to try what Karpathy is describing live today, here's a demo I wrote a few months ago: https://universal.oroborus.org/
It takes mouse clicks, sends them to the LLM, and asks it to render static HTML+CSS of the output frame. HTML+CSS is basically a JPEG here, the original implementation WAS JPEG but diffusion models can't do accurate enough text yet.
My conclusions from doing this project and interacting with the result were: if LLMs keep scaling in performance and cost, programming languages are going to fade away. The long-term future won't be LLMs writing code, it'll be LLMs doing direct computation.
karpathy|8 months ago
dang|8 months ago
There's so much demand around this, people are just super eager to get the information. I can understand why, because it was my favorite talk as well :)
tomhow|8 months ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44314423
kapildev|8 months ago
pudiklubi|8 months ago
sotix|8 months ago
sensanaty|8 months ago
[deleted]
pudiklubi|8 months ago
https://x.com/karpathy/status/1935077692258558443
levocardia|8 months ago
chrisweekly|8 months ago
swyx|8 months ago
theyinwhy|8 months ago
Edit: the emoji at the end of the original sentence has not been quoted. How a smile makes the difference. Original tweet: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1935077692258558443
afiodorov|8 months ago
Reminds me of work where I spend more time figuring out how to run repos than actually modifying code. A lot of my work is focused on figuring out the development environment and deployment process - all with very locked down permissions.
I do think LLMs are likely to change industry considerably, as LLM-guided rewrites are sometimes easier than adding a new feature or fixing a bug - especially if the rewrite is something into more LLM-friendly (i.e., a popular framework). Each rewrite makes the code further Claude-codeable or Cursor-codeable; ready to iterate even faster.
andai|8 months ago
bcrosby95|8 months ago
Software 3.0 isn't about using AI to write code. It's about using AI instead of code.
So not Human -> AI -> Create Code -> Compile Code -> Code Runs -> The Magic Happens. Instead, it's Human -> AI -> The Magic Happens.
imiric|8 months ago
This is why I think the AI industry is mostly smoke and mirrors. If these tools are really as revolutionary as they claim they are, then they should be able to build better versions of themselves, and we should be seeing exponential improvements of their capabilities. Yet in the last year or so we've seen marginal improvements based mainly on increasing the scale and quality of the data they're trained on, and the scale of deployments, with some clever engineering work thrown in.
bmicraft|8 months ago
autobodie|8 months ago
zie1ony|8 months ago
obiefernandez|8 months ago
https://leanpub.com/patterns-of-application-development-usin...
adriand|8 months ago
agarren|8 months ago
I kind of expect that from someone heading a company that appears to have sold-the-farm in an AI gamble. It’s interesting to see a similar viewpoint here (all biases considered)
unknown|8 months ago
[deleted]
__loam|8 months ago
finallyyes|8 months ago
[deleted]
alganet|8 months ago
> imagine that the inputs for the car are on the bottom, and they're going through the software stack to produce the steering and acceleration
> imagine inspecting them, and it's got an autonomy slider
> imagine works as like this binary array of a different situation, of like what works and doesn't work
--
Software 3.0 is imaginary. All in your head.
I'm kidding, of course. He's hyping because he needs to.
Let's imagine together:
Imagine it can be proven to be safe.
Imagine it being reliable.
Imagine I can pre-train on my own cheap commodity hardware.
Imagine no one using it for war.
serial_dev|8 months ago
Henchman21|8 months ago
no_wizard|8 months ago
I don’t think it’s the 4th wave of pioneering a new dawn of civilization but it’s clear LLMs will remain useful when applied correctly.
bix6|8 months ago
umeshunni|8 months ago
It felt like that was the direction for a while, but in the last year or so, the gap seems to have widened. I'm curious whether this is my perception or validated by some metric.
arkj|8 months ago
I think it's a bit early to change your mind here. We love your 2.0, let's wait for some more time till th e dust settles so we can see clearly and up the revision number.
In fact I'm a bit confused about the number AK has in mind. Anyone else knows how he arrived at software 2.0?
I remember a talk by professor Sussman where he suggest we don't know how to compute, yet[1].
I was thinking he meant this,
Software 0.1 - Machine Code/Assembly Code Software 1.0 - HLLs with Compilers/Interpreters/Libraries Software 2.0 - Language comprehension with LLMs
If we are calling weights 2.0 and NN with libraries as 3.0, then shouldn't we account for functional and oo programming in the numbering scheme?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB5TrK7A4pI
autobodie|8 months ago
DaveChurchill|8 months ago
pests|8 months ago
koakuma-chan|8 months ago
ath3nd|8 months ago
Software 2.0? 3.0? Why stop there? Why not software 1911.1337? We went through crypto, NFTs, web3.0, now LLMs are hyped as if they are frigging AGI (spoiler, LLMs are not designed to be AGI, and even if they were, you sure as hell won't be the one to use them to your advantage, so why are you so irrationally happy about it?).
Man this industry is so tiring! What is the most tiring is the dog-like enthusiasm of the people who buy it EVERY.DAMN.TYPE, as if it's gonna change the life of most of them for the better. Sure, some of these are worse and much more useless than others (NFTs), but in the core of all of it is this cult-like awe we as a society have towards figures like the Karpathy's, Musks and Altmans of this world.
How are LLMs gonna help society? How are they gonna help people work, create and connect with one another? They take away the joy of making art, the joy of writing, of learning how to play a music instrument and sing, and now they are coming for software engineering. Sure, you might be 1%/2% faster, but are you happier, are you smarter (probably not: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/14/10/4115)?
throwawayoldie|8 months ago
fenghorn|8 months ago
steveBK123|8 months ago
nico|8 months ago
amelius|8 months ago
1970-01-01|8 months ago
agentultra|8 months ago
"We need to rewrite a lot of software," ok... why?
"AI is the new electricity" Really now... so I should expect a bill every month that always increases and to have my access cut off intermittently when there's a rolling AI power outage?
Interesting times indeed.
msgodel|8 months ago
meerab|8 months ago
https://videotobe.com/play/youtube/LCEmiRjPEtQ
jimmy76615|8 months ago
layer8|8 months ago
bredren|8 months ago
waynenilsen|8 months ago
sensanaty|8 months ago
throwawayoldie|8 months ago
Who wants to start a pool on when the first advertisement for "Software 3.0" goes up in an airport somewhere?
uncircle|8 months ago
yapyap|8 months ago
great name already
romain_batlle|8 months ago
gooseus|8 months ago
ath3nd|8 months ago
They want to onboard as many people on their stuff and make them as dependent on it as possible, so the switching costs are more.
It's the classic scam. Look at what Meta are doing now that they reached end of the line and are trying to squeeze out people for profitability:
- Bringing Ads to WhatsApp: https://apnews.com/article/whatsapp-meta-advertising-messagi...
- Desperately trying by any illegal means possible to steal your data: https://localmess.github.io/
- Firing all the people who built their empire: https://www.thestreet.com/employment/meta-rewards-executives...
- Enabled ethnic cleansing in multiple instances: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
If you can't see the total moral bankruptcy of Big Tech, you gotta be blind. Don't Be Evil my ass. To me, LLMs have only one purpose: dumb down the population, make people doubt what's real and what's not, and enrich the tech overlords while our societies drown in the garbage they create.
zkmon|8 months ago
kaladin-jasnah|8 months ago
Frummy|8 months ago
"Q: What does your name (badmephisto) mean?
A: I've had this name for a really long time. I used to be a big fan of Diablo2, so when I had to create my email address username on hotmail, i decided to use Mephisto as my username. But of course Mephisto was already taken, so I tried Mephisto1, Mephisto2, all the way up to about 9, and all was taken. So then I thought... "hmmm, what kind of chracteristic does Mephisto posess?" Now keep in mind that this was about 10 years ago, and my English language dictionary composed of about 20 words. One of them was the word 'bad'. Since Mephisto (the brother of Diablo) was certainly pretty bad, I punched in badmephisto and that worked. Had I known more words it probably would have ended up being evilmephisto or something :p"
unknown|8 months ago
[deleted]
swah|8 months ago
swyx|8 months ago
pudiklubi|8 months ago
iLoveOncall|8 months ago
> The more reliance we have on these models, which already is, like, really dramatic
Please point me to a single critical component anywhere that is built on LLMs. There's absolutely no reliance on models, and ChatGPT being down has absolutely no impact on anything beside teenagers not being able to cheat on their homeworks and LLM wrappers not being able to wrap.
Aeolun|8 months ago
unknown|8 months ago
[deleted]
lvl155|8 months ago
koakuma-chan|8 months ago
jacobgorm|8 months ago
dang|8 months ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
93po|8 months ago
mattlangston|8 months ago
adamnemecek|8 months ago
yusina|8 months ago
I love Andrej, but come on.
Writing essentially punch cards 70 years ago, writing C 40 years ago and writing Go or Typescript or Haskell 10 years ago, these are all very different activities.
TeMPOraL|8 months ago
The main thing that changed about programming is the social/political/bureaucratic side.
jdougan|8 months ago
93po|8 months ago
Aeroi|8 months ago
unknown|8 months ago
[deleted]
sammcgrail|8 months ago
pudiklubi|8 months ago
computator|8 months ago
> LLMs make mistakes that basically no human will make, like, you know, it will insist that 9.11 is greater than 9.9, or that there are two bars of strawberry. These are some famous examples.
But you answered it: It’s a stupid mistake a human makes when trying to mock the stupid mistakes that LLMs make!
pera|8 months ago
pudiklubi|8 months ago
fhd2|8 months ago
rvz|8 months ago
One bundles "AGI" with broken promises and bullshit claims of "benefits to humanity" and "abundance for all" when at the same time it takes jobs away with the goal of achieving 10% global unemployment in the next 5 years.
The other is an overpromised scam wrapped up in worthless minted "tokens" on a slow blockchain (Ethereum).
Terms like "Software 3.0", "Web 3.0" and even "AGI" are all bullshit.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF|8 months ago
snickell|8 months ago
It takes mouse clicks, sends them to the LLM, and asks it to render static HTML+CSS of the output frame. HTML+CSS is basically a JPEG here, the original implementation WAS JPEG but diffusion models can't do accurate enough text yet.
My conclusions from doing this project and interacting with the result were: if LLMs keep scaling in performance and cost, programming languages are going to fade away. The long-term future won't be LLMs writing code, it'll be LLMs doing direct computation.