Backpropagation is a leaky abstraction (2016)

First of all, this is not a competition between “are LLMs better than search”.

Secondly, the article is from 2016, ChatGPT didn’t exist back then

I doubt he's letting LLM creep in to his decision-making in 2025, aside from fun side projects (vibes). We don't ever come across Karpathy going to an LLM or expressing that an LLM helped in any of his Youtube videos about building LLMs.

He's just test driving LLMs, nothing more.

Nobody's asking this core question in podcasts. "How much and how exactly are you using LLMs in your daily flow?"

I'm guessing it's like actors not wanting to watch their own movies.

Karpathy talking for 2 hours about how he uses LLMs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWvNQjAaOHw

> Continuing the journey of optimal LLM-assisted coding experience. In particular, I find that instead of narrowing in on a perfect one thing my usage is increasingly diversifying

https://x.com/karpathy/status/1959703967694545296

Vibing, not firing at his ML problems.

He's doing a capability check in this video (for the general audience, which is good of course), not attacking a hard problem in ML domain.

Despite this tweet: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1964020416139448359 , I've never seen him citing an LLM helped him out in ML work.

You're free to believe whatever fantasy you wish, but as someone who frequently consults an LLM alongside other resources when thinking about complex and abstract problems, there is no way in hell that Karpathy intentionally limits his options by excluding LLMs when seeking knowledge or understanding.

If he did not believe in the capability of these models, he would be doing something else with his time.

One can believe in the capability of a technology but on principle refuse to use implementations of it built on ethically flawed approaches (e.g., violating GPL licensing laws and/or copyright, thus harming open source ecosystem).

AI is more important than copyright law. Any fight between them will not go well for the latter.

Truth be told, a whole lot of things are more important than copyright law.

What you see as copyright violation, I see as liberation. I have open models running locally on my machine that would have felled kingdoms in the past.

Important for whom, the copyright creators? Being fed is more important than supermarkets, so feel free to raid them?

Conflating natural law -- our need to eat -- with something we pulled out of our asses a couple hundred years ago to control the dissemination of ideas on paper is certainly one way to think about the question.

A pretty terrible way, but... certainly one way.

I am sure it had nothing to do with the amount of innovation that has been happening since, including the entire foundation that gave us LLMs themselves.

It would be crazy to think the protections of IP laws and the ability to claim original work as your own and have a degree of control over it as an author fostered creativity in science and arts.

I personally see no issue with training and running open local models by individuals. When corporations run scrapers and expropriate IP at an industrial scale, then charge for using them, it is different.

What about Meta and the commercially licensed family of Llama open-weight models?

Innovation? Patents are designed to protect innovation. Copyright is designed to make sure Disney gets a buck every time someone shares a picture of Mickey Mouse.

The human race has produced an extremely rich body of work long before US copyright law and the DMCA existed. Instead of creating new financial models which embrace freedoms while still ensuring incentives to create new art, we have contorted outdated financial models, various modes of rent-seeking and gatekeeping, to remain viable via artificial and arbitrary restriction of freedom.