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

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1479 points sandslash | 19 comments | 19 Jun 25 00:33 UTC | HN request time: 1.325s | source | bottom
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darqis ◴[19 Jun 25 10:52 UTC] No.44317373[source]▶
when I started coding at the age of 11 in machine code and assembly on the C64, the dream was to create software that creates software. Nowadays it's almost reality, almost because the devil is always in the details. When you're used to write code, writing code is relatively fast. You need this knowledge to debug issues with generated code. However you're now telling AI to fix the bugs in the generated code. I see it kind of like machine code becomes overlaid with asm which becomes overlaid with C or whatever higher level language, which then uses dogma/methodology like MVC and such and on top of that there's now the AI input and generation layer. But it's not widely available. Affording more than 1 computer is a luxury. Many households are even struggling to get by. When you see those what 5 7 Mac Minis, which normal average Joe can afford that or does even have to knowledge to construct an LLM at home? I don't. This is a toy for rich people. Just like with public clouds like AWS, GCP I left out, because the cost is too high and running my own is also too expensive and there are cheaper alternatives that not only cost less but also have way less overhead.

What would be interesting to see is what those kids produced with their vibe coding.

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dist-epoch ◴[19 Jun 25 11:42 UTC] No.44317699[source]▶
> This is a toy for rich people

GitHub copilot has a free tier.

Google gives you thousands of free LLM API calls per day.

There are other free providers too.

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guappa ◴[19 Jun 25 12:07 UTC] No.44317868[source]▶
1st dose is free
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1. infecto ◴[19 Jun 25 12:33 UTC] No.44318058[source]▶
LLM APIs are pretty darn cheap for most of the developed worlds income levels.
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2. guappa ◴[19 Jun 25 12:51 UTC] No.44318209[source]▶
Yeah, because they're bleeding money like crazy now.

You should consider how much it actually costs, not how much they charge.

How do people fail to consider this?

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3. bdangubic ◴[19 Jun 25 12:52 UTC] No.44318223[source]▶
how much does it cost?
4. NoOn3 ◴[19 Jun 25 13:01 UTC] No.44318307[source]▶
It's cheap now. But if you take into account all the training costs, then at such prices they cannot make a profit in any way. This is called dumping to capture the market.
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5. infecto ◴[19 Jun 25 13:14 UTC] No.44318415[source]▶
No doubt the complete cost of training and to getting where we are today has been significant and I don’t know how the accounting will look years from now but you are just making up the rest based on feelings. We know operationally OpenAI is profitable on purely the runtime side, nobody knows how that will look when accounting for R&D but you have no qualification to say they cannot make a profit in any way.
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6. infecto ◴[19 Jun 25 13:17 UTC] No.44318435[source]▶
>You should consider how much it actually costs, not how much they charge. How do people fail to consider this?

Sure, nobody can predict the long-term economics with certainty but companies like OpenAI already have compelling business fundamentals today. This isn’t some scooter startup praying for margins to appear; it’s a platform with real, scaled revenue and enterprise traction.

But yeah, tell me more about how my $200/mo plan is bankrupting them.

7. NoOn3 ◴[19 Jun 25 13:28 UTC] No.44318506{3}[source]▶
Yes, if you do not take into account the cost of training, I think it is very likely profitable. The cost of working models is not so high. This is just my opinion based on open models and I admit that I have not carried out accurate calculations.
8. NitpickLawyer ◴[19 Jun 25 13:56 UTC] No.44318736[source]▶
No, there are 3rd party providers that run open-weights models and they are (most likely) not bleeding money. Their prices are kind of similar, and make sense in a napkin-math kind of way (we looked into this when ordering hardware).

You are correct that some providers might reduce prices for market capture, but the alternatives are still cheap, and some are close to being competitive in quality to the API providers.

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9. diggan ◴[19 Jun 25 14:46 UTC] No.44319180[source]▶
> But if you take into account all the training costs

Not everyone has to paid that cost, as some companies are releasing weights for download and local use (like Llama) and then some other companies are going even further and releasing open source models+weights (like OLMo). If you're a provider hosting those, I don't think it makes sense to take the training cost into account when planning your own infrastructure.

Although I don't it makes much sense personally, seemingly it makes sense for other companies.

10. dist-epoch ◴[19 Jun 25 15:02 UTC] No.44319311[source]▶
There is no "capture" here, it's trivial to switch LLM/providers, they all use OpenAI API. It's literally a URL change.
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11. guappa ◴[19 Jun 25 15:56 UTC] No.44319856{3}[source]▶
Except they have to retrain constantly, so why would you not consider the cost of training?
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12. jamessinghal ◴[19 Jun 25 16:03 UTC] No.44319913{3}[source]▶
This is changing; OpenAI's newer API (Responses) is required to include reasoning tokens in the context while using the API, to get the reasoning summaries, and to use some of the OpenAI provided tools. Google's OpenAI compatibility supports Chat Completions, not Responses.

As the LLM developers continue to add unique features to their APIs, the shared API which is now OpenAI will only support the minimal common subset and many will probably deprecate the compatibility API. Devs will have to rely on SDKs to offer comptibility.

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13. Eggpants ◴[19 Jun 25 16:07 UTC] No.44319946{3}[source]▶
Starts with “No” then follows that up with “most likely”.

So in other words you don’t know the real answer but posted anyways.

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14. Eggpants ◴[19 Jun 25 16:20 UTC] No.44320080[source]▶
Just wait for the enshitencation of LLM services.

It going to get wild when the tech bro investors demand ads be the included in responses.

It will be trivial for a version of AdWords where someone pays for response words be replaced. “Car” replaced by “Honda”, variable names like “index” by “this_index_variable_is_sponsered_by_coinbase” etc.

I’m trying to be funny with the last one but something like this will be coming sooner than later. Remember, google search used to be good and was ruined by bonus seeking executives.

15. NitpickLawyer ◴[19 Jun 25 16:43 UTC] No.44320293{4}[source]▶
That most likely is for the case where they made their investment calculations wrong and they won't be able to recoup their hw costs. So I think it's safe to say there may be the outlier 3rd party provider that may lose money in the long run.

But the majority of them are serving at ~ the same price, and that matches to the raw cost + some profit if you actually look into serving those models. And those prices are still cheap.

So yeah, I stand by what I wrote, "most likely" included.

My main answer was "no, ..." because the gp post was only considering the closed providers only (oai, anthropic, goog, etc). But youc an get open-weight models pretty cheap, and they are pretty close to SotA, depending on your needs.

16. dist-epoch ◴[19 Jun 25 18:46 UTC] No.44321359{4}[source]▶
It's still trivial to map to a somewhat different API. Google has it's Vertex/GenAI API flavors.

At least for now, LLM APIs are just JSONs with a bunch of prompts/responses in them and maybe some file URLs/IDs.

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17. lelanthran ◴[19 Jun 25 19:31 UTC] No.44321762{3}[source]▶
> There is no "capture" here, it's trivial to switch LLM/providers, they all use OpenAI API. It's literally a URL change.

So? That's true for search as well, and yet Google has been top-dog for decades in spite of having worse results and a poorer interface than almost all of the competition.

18. jamessinghal ◴[19 Jun 25 21:48 UTC] No.44322820{5}[source]▶
It isn't necessarily difficult, but it's significantly more effort than swapping a URL as I originally was replying to.
19. infecto ◴[20 Jun 25 11:56 UTC] No.44326856{4}[source]▶
In the medium to long term that R&D matters. In the short term it’s not as important of a metric. I absolutely agree from an underwriting prospective one would ideally be considering those costs but I also think it’s dishonest to simply say they are bleeding money, end of story.

They dont have to retrain constantly and that’s where opinions like yours fall short. I don’t believe anyone has a concrete vision on the economics in the medium to a long term. It’s biased ignorance to hold a strong position in the down or up case.