← All IntelClip / EntertainmentGhosts not animals: mental model for LLMs
From Andrej Karpathy on Vibe Coding & Agentic Engineering (AI Ascent 2026) · ≈23:41
“We are summoning ghosts.”
“if you have a good model of what they are or are not, then you're going to be more competent at uh using them”
“Like if you yell at them, they're not going to work better or or worse or it doesn't have any impact.”
What’s in it
- Reframes LLMs as summoned 'ghosts,' not evolved animals
- Why the animal-vs-ghost model shapes how you use AI
- Honest take: framing is philosophizing, not a practical playbook
Clip transcript
thought-provoking piece around animals versus ghosts. Um and the idea is that we're not building animals. We are summoning ghosts. Um and these are jagged forms of intelligence that are shaped by data and reward functions, but not by intrinsic motivation or fun or curiosity or empowerment, uh things that kind of came about via evolution. Um why does that framing matter? And what does it actually change about how you build and deploy and evaluate or even trust them? Uh yes, so Yeah, I think the reason I wrote about this is because I'm trying to wrap my head around what these things are, right? Because if you have a good model of what they are or are not, then you're going to be more competent at uh using them. Um and I do think that um I don't know if it has I'm not sure if it actually has like real power. >> [laughter] >> I think it's a little bit of philosophizing. But I do think that um I think it's just um coming to terms with the fact that these things are not, you know, animal intelligences. Like if you yell at them, they're not going to work better or or worse or it doesn't have any impact. Um and uh it's all just kind of like these statistical simulation circuits where the the substrate is pre-training, so like statistics. And then but then there's RL bolting on top, so it kind of like increases the disadvantages and um maybe it's just kind of like a mindset of what I'm coming into or what's likely to work or not likely to work or how to modify it, but I don't actually I don't know that I have like here are the five obvious outcomes of how to make your system better. It's more just being suspicious of it and um figuring out over time.
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