Andrej got famous because of his educational content. He's a smart dude but his research wasn't incredibly unique amongst his cohort at Stanford. He created publicly available educational content around ML that was high quality and got hugely popular. This is what made him a huge name in ML, which he then successfully leveraged into positions of substantial authority in his post-grad career.
He is a very effective communicator and has a lot of people listening to him. And while he is definitely more knowledgeable than most people, I don't think that he is uniquely capable of seeing the future of these technologies.
While I appreciate an appeal to authority is a logical fallacy, you can't really use that to ignore everyone's experience and expertise. Sometimes people who have a huge amount of experience and knowledge on a subject do actually make a valid point, and their authority on the subject is enough to make them worth listening to.
I wish he went back to writing educational blogs/books/papers/material so we can learn how to build AI ourselves.
Most of us have the imagination to figure out how to best use AI. I'm sure most of us considered what OpenClaw is doing like from the first days of LLMs. What we miss is the guidance to understand the rapid advances from first principles.
If he doesn't want to provide that, perhaps he can write an AI tool to help us understand AI papers.
AI from first principles has not changed. Fundamentally it is: neural nets, transformers and RL. The most important paper in recent years is on CoT [https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.11903] and I'm not even sure what comes close.
And I think what's more important these days is knowing how to filter the noise from the signal.
This is probably one of the better blogs I have read recently that shows the general direction currently in AI which are improvements on the generator / verifier loop: https://www.julian.ac/blog/2025/11/13/alphaproof-paper/
He did. His entire startup is about educational content. Nanochat is way better than llama / qwen as an educational tool. Though it is still missing the vision module.
Andrej is an extremely effective communicator and educator. But I don't agree that he is one of the most significant AI pioneers in history. His research contributions are significant but not exceptional compared to other folks around him at the time. He got famous for free online courses, not his research. His work at Tesla was not exactly a rousing success.
Today I see him as a major influence in how people, especially tech people, think about AI tools. That's valuable. But I don't really think it makes him a pioneer.
You can debate the meaning of the word pioneer but think of it this way: OpenAI created this new AI boom, and Andrej is a co-founder of the company that did that.
I bet they feel so, so silly. A quick bit of reflection might reveal sarcasm.
I'll live up to my username and be terribly brave with a silly rhetorical question: why are we hearing about him through Simon? Don't answer, remember. Rhetorical. All the way up and down.
Welp, would have been a more useful post if he provided some context as to why he feels contempt for Karpathy rather than a post that is likely to come across as the parent interpreted.
https://karpathy.ai/
PHD in neural networks under Fei-Fei Li, founder of OpenAI, director of AI at Tesla, etc. He knows what he's talking about.
I think this misses it a bit.
Andrej got famous because of his educational content. He's a smart dude but his research wasn't incredibly unique amongst his cohort at Stanford. He created publicly available educational content around ML that was high quality and got hugely popular. This is what made him a huge name in ML, which he then successfully leveraged into positions of substantial authority in his post-grad career.
He is a very effective communicator and has a lot of people listening to him. And while he is definitely more knowledgeable than most people, I don't think that he is uniquely capable of seeing the future of these technologies.
At one point he did. Cognitive atrophy has led him to decline just like everyone else.
Where do we draw the line? Was einstein in his later years a pop physicist?
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Oh, like the LLM OS?
Ex cathedra.
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While I appreciate an appeal to authority is a logical fallacy, you can't really use that to ignore everyone's experience and expertise. Sometimes people who have a huge amount of experience and knowledge on a subject do actually make a valid point, and their authority on the subject is enough to make them worth listening to.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy
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Really smart AI guy ex Tesla, cum educator now cum vibe coder (he coined the term vibe coder)
The person that made the svmjs library I used for a blue monday.
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I wish he went back to writing educational blogs/books/papers/material so we can learn how to build AI ourselves.
Most of us have the imagination to figure out how to best use AI. I'm sure most of us considered what OpenClaw is doing like from the first days of LLMs. What we miss is the guidance to understand the rapid advances from first principles.
If he doesn't want to provide that, perhaps he can write an AI tool to help us understand AI papers.
AI from first principles has not changed. Fundamentally it is: neural nets, transformers and RL. The most important paper in recent years is on CoT [https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.11903] and I'm not even sure what comes close. And I think what's more important these days is knowing how to filter the noise from the signal.
This is probably one of the better blogs I have read recently that shows the general direction currently in AI which are improvements on the generator / verifier loop: https://www.julian.ac/blog/2025/11/13/alphaproof-paper/
He did. His entire startup is about educational content. Nanochat is way better than llama / qwen as an educational tool. Though it is still missing the vision module.
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Andrej is an extremely effective communicator and educator. But I don't agree that he is one of the most significant AI pioneers in history. His research contributions are significant but not exceptional compared to other folks around him at the time. He got famous for free online courses, not his research. His work at Tesla was not exactly a rousing success.
Today I see him as a major influence in how people, especially tech people, think about AI tools. That's valuable. But I don't really think it makes him a pioneer.
You can debate the meaning of the word pioneer but think of it this way: OpenAI created this new AI boom, and Andrej is a co-founder of the company that did that.
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I bet they feel so, so silly. A quick bit of reflection might reveal sarcasm.
I'll live up to my username and be terribly brave with a silly rhetorical question: why are we hearing about him through Simon? Don't answer, remember. Rhetorical. All the way up and down.
Welp, would have been a more useful post if he provided some context as to why he feels contempt for Karpathy rather than a post that is likely to come across as the parent interpreted.