Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

Fun demo of an early idea was posted by Oriol just yesterday :)

https://x.com/OriolVinyalsML/status/1935005985070084197

This is crazy cool, even if not necessarily the best use case for this idea

it's impressive but it seems like a crappier UX? that none of the patterns can really be memorized

Having different documents come up every time you go into the documents directory seems hellishly terrible.

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Maybe we can collect all of this salt and operate a Thorium reactor with it, this in turn can then power AI.

We'll need to boil a few more lakes before we get to that stage I'm afraid, who needs water when you can have your AI hallucinate some for you after all?

On one hand, I'm incredibly impressed by the technology behind that demo. On the other hand, I can't think of many things that would piss me off more than a non-deterministic operating system.

I like my tools to be predictable. Google search trying to predict that I want the image or shopping tag based on my query already drives me crazy. If my entire operating system did that, I'm pretty sure I'd throw my computer out a window.

It's a brand of terribleness I've somewhat gotten used to, opening Google Drive every time, when it takes me to the "Suggested" tab. I can't recall a single time when it had the document I care about anywhere close to the top.

There's still nothing that beats the UX of Norton Commander.

> incredibly impressed by the technology behind that demo

An LLM generating some HTML?

Who needs water when all these hot takes come from sources so dense, they're about to collapse into black holes.

Is me not wanting the UI of my OS to shift with every mouse click a hot take? If me wanting to have the consistent "When I click here, X happens" behavior instead of the "I click here and I'm Feeling Lucky happens" behavior is equal to me being dense, so be it I guess.

At a speed that feels completely seamless to navigate through. Yeah, I'm pretty impressed by that.

No. But you interpreting and evaluating the demo in question as suggesting the things you described - frankly, yes. It takes a deep gravity well to miss a point this clear from this close.

It's a tech demo. It shows you it's possible to do these things live, in real time (and to back Karpathy's point about tech spread patterns, it's accessible to you and me right now). It's not saying it's a good idea - but there are obvious seeds of good ideas there. For one, it shows you a vision of an OS or software you can trivially extend yourself on the fly. "I wish it did X", bam, it does. And no one says it has to be non-deterministic each time you press some button. It can just fill what's missing and make additions permanent, fully deterministic after creation.

My takeaway from the demo is less that "it's different each time", but more a "it can be different for different users and their styles of operating" - a poweruser can now see a different Settings UI than a basic user, and it can be generated realtime based on the persona context of the user.

Example use case (chosen specifically for tech): An IDE UI that starts basic, and exposes functionality over time as the human developer's skills grow.

"Please don't fulminate."

"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That looks both cool and infuriating

I would bet good money that many of the functions they chose not to drill down into (such as settings -> volume) do nothing at all or cause an error.

It's a fronted generator. It's fast. That's cool. But is being pitched as a functioning OS generator and I can't help but think it isn't given the failure rates for those sorts of tasks. Further, the success rates for HTML generation probably _are_ good enough for a Holmes-esque (perhaps too harsh) rugpull (again, too harsh) demo.

A cool glimpse into what the future might look like in any case.

I feel like one quickly hits a similar partial observability problem as with e.g. light sensors. How often do you wave around annoyed because the light turned off.

To get _truly_ self driving UIs you need to read the mind of your users. It's some heavy tailed distribution all the way down. Interesting research problem on its own.

We already have adaptive UIs (profiles in VSC anyone? Vim, Emacs?) they're mostly under-utilized because takes time to setup + most people are not better at designing their own workflow relative to the sane default.

Read the code that is actually being generated. It's only the content of the page, which itself is loaded progressively.

It takes 2 seconds to generate an extremely basic 300 characters page of content. Again, what is impressive here?

It's not fast, it gives the illusion of being fast.

I know what it's doing and I'm impressed. If you understand what it's doing and aren't impressed, that's cool too. I think we just see things differently and I doubt either of us will convince the other one to change their mind on this