← All IntelClip / EntertainmentThe car wash example of jagged intelligence
From Andrej Karpathy on Vibe Coding & Agentic Engineering (AI Ascent 2026) · ≈11:20
“you need to actually be in the loop a little bit and you need to treat them as tools and you do have to kind of stay in touch with what they're doing”
What’s in it
- Why top models nail hard code but flub trivial questions
- Understand 'jaggedness' and why it means staying in the loop
- Treat AI models as tools, not autonomous replacements
Clip transcript
but I think to me the big um, I guess like the big mystery is uh, the favorite example for a while was that how many letters are are in a strawberry? And the models would famously get this wrong and it's an example of jaggedness. Uh, the models now patch this, I think, but the new one is I want to go to a car wash to wash my car, and it's 50 m away, should I drive or should I walk? And state-of-the-art models today will tell you to walk because it's so close. How is it possible that state-of-the-art Opus 4.7 will simultaneously refactor a 100,000 like >> [laughter] >> code base a line code base or find zero-day vulnerabilities and yet tells me to walk to this car wash? This is insane. And to whatever extent these models are remain jagged, it's an indication that number one, maybe something slightly off. Or number two, you need to actually be in the loop a little bit and you need to treat them as tools and you do have to kind of stay in touch with what they're doing. And so I think all of my writing, long story short, about verifiability is just trying to understand um why these things are jagged, is there any pattern to it? And I think it's a some kind of combination of verifiable
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