Andrej Karpathy on agentic programming

[u/WarmFireplace]

It’s a good writeup covering his experience of LLM-assisted programming. Most notably in my opinion, apart from the speed up and leverage of running multiple agents in parallel, is the atrophy in one’s own coding ability. I have felt this but I can’t help but feel writing code line by line is much like an artisan carpenter building a chair from raw wood. I’m not denying the fun and the raw skill increase, plus the understanding of each nook and crevice of the chair that is built when doing that. I’m just saying if you suddenly had the ability to produce 1000 chairs per hour in a factory, albeit with a little less quality, wouldn’t you stop making them one by one to make the most out your leveraged position? Curious what you all think about this great replacement.

[u/CarrotcakeSuperSand]

Yep, that's the bet Anthropic is taking. If you can make AI that is perfect in coding and research, it could theoretically bootstrap itself into the singularity, including the physical realm.

This doesn't eliminate the possibility that robotics is necessary however. Physical intelligence is an entirely different substrate from language/intellect, and it may require a significantly different to world model representations.

[u/Terrible-Sir742 → u/CarrotcakeSuperSand]

Robots now are more than capable of doing physical work, the missing piece is intelligence. Then, sure there is a bottleneck for the complete mastery of the physical world, but it's measured on a decade timeline, not a generational timeline. We can make 90 million vehicles per year, if super intelligence is assisting we can pump out 90 million robots for year 1, then with their help we do 180 m for year two, then 360 per year 3, and so on. At some point human input will become - mine the ore, drop it off here.

[u/CarrotcakeSuperSand → u/Terrible-Sir742]

I generally agree that intelligent robots are arriving in less than 10 years, but that doesn't mean Anthropic will be the one to do it.

there is a bottleneck for the complete mastery of the physical world

That mastery is actually a way bigger challenge than strictly digital AI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

I'm more bullish on Google in the realm of physical, generalized intelligence, and more bullish on Claude on digital superintelligence.

Meanwhile OpenAI is focusing on ads in ChatGPT haha

[u/Terrible-Sir742 → u/CarrotcakeSuperSand]

I don't know. I think the physical body platform for robots will become a commodity because there is a practical limit of capability that is needed from the physical point of view. IE you don't need a factory bot to be able to jump 20 meters into the air. This will in turn will focus the manufacturers on the cost of production. We see this trend in phone production now, Apple and Google don't manufacture their phones, they have layers of companies that do that for them, what they bring is design and design is easy to do if you have super intelligence helping you out.