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

He's talking about "LLM Utility companies going down and the world becoming dumber" as a sign of humanity's progress.

This if anything should be a huge red flag

He lives in a GenAI bubble where everyone is self-congratulating about the usage of LLMs.

The reality is that there's not a single critical component anywhere that is built on LLMs. There's absolutely no reliance on models, and ChatGPT being down has absolutely no impact on anything beside teenagers not being able to cheat on their homeworks and LLM wrappers not being able to wrap.

> The reality is that there's not a single critical component anywhere that is built on LLMs.

Remember that there are billion dollar usecases where being correct is not important. For example, shopping recommendations, advertizing, search results, image captioning, etc. All of these usecases have humans consuming the output, and LLMs can play a useful role as productivity boosters.

And none of those are crucial.

His point is that the world is RELIANT on GenAI. This isn't true.

The full quote from 7:40 in the video: "I think it's kind of fascinating to me that when the state-of-the-art LLMs go down, it's actually kind of like an intelligence brownout in the world. It's kind of like when the voltage is unreliable in the grid, and the planet just gets dumber. The more reliance we have on these models, which already is really dramatic and I think will continue to grow."

I don't think his point was that LLMs are as crucial as the power grid, or even close. He's just saying that he finds the comparison interesting, for whatever reason. If you find it stupid instead, that's okay.