Andrej Karpathy — “We’re summoning ghosts, not building animals”

On Dwarkesh Patel's podcast, Andrej Karpathy says this will be the decade of agents, not the year of agents. Karpathy is reacting to timelines that seem over-predicted. Current agents such as Claude and Codex are impressive and Karpathy uses them daily, but they lack continual learning (remembering what you tell them), enough multimodal ability, and reliable computer use. Karpathy compares an agent to an intern who cannot yet be given real work.

The ten-year estimate is an intuition from about fifteen years of watching AI predictions play out, not a calculation. Karpathy also says models are better seen as ghosts than animals: they are trained by imitating human data from the internet, not shaped by evolution, so analogies to animal learning should be careful. These are Karpathy's opinions.