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starchild3001yesterday at 1:01 AM3 repliesview on HN

The distinction Karpathy draws between "growing animals" and "summoning ghosts" via RLVR is the mental model I didn't know I needed to explain the current state of jagged intelligence. It perfectly articulates why trust in benchmarks is collapsing; we aren't creating generally adaptive survivors, but rather over-optimizing specific pockets of the embedding space against verifiable rewards.

I’m also sold on his take on "vibe coding" leading to ephemeral software; the idea of spinning up a custom, one-off tokenizer or app just to debug a single issue, and then deleting it, feels like a real shift.


Replies

HarHarVeryFunnyyesterday at 2:40 PM

> The distinction Karpathy draws between "growing animals" and "summoning ghosts" via RLVR

I don't see these descriptions as very insightful.

The difference between general/animal intelligence and jagged/LLM intelligence is simply that humans/animals really ARE intelligent (the word was created to describe this human capability), while LLMs are just echoing narrow portions of the intelligent output of humans (those portions that are amenable to RLVR capture).

For an artificial intelligence to be intelligent in it's own right, and therefore be generally intelligent, it would need to need - like an animal - to be embodied (even if only virtually), autonomous, predicting the outcomes of it's own actions (not auto-regressively trained), learning incrementally and continually, built with innate traits like curiosity and boredom to put and keep itself in learning situations, etc.

Of course not all animals are generally intelligent - many (insects, fish, reptiles, many birds) just have narrow "hard coded" instinctual behaviors, but others like humans are generalists who evolution have therefore honed for adaptive lifetime learning and general intelligence.

foursideyesterday at 4:00 PM

> I’m also sold on his take on "vibe coding" leading to ephemeral software; the idea of spinning up a custom, one-off tokenizer or app just to debug a single issue, and then deleting it, feels like a real shift.

We should keep in mind that currently our LLM use is subsidized. When the money dries up and we have to pay the real prices I’ll be interested to see if we can still consider whipping up one time apps as basically free

graemefawcettyesterday at 3:47 AM

I've been doing it for months, it's lovely

https://tech.lgbt/@graeme/115749759729642908

It's a stack based on finishing the job Jupyter started. Fences as functions, callable and composable.

Same shape as an MCP. No training required, just walk them through the patterns.

Literally, it's spatially organized. Turns out a woman named Mrs Curwen and I share some thoughts on pedagogy.

There does in fact exist a functor that maps 18th century piano instruction to context engineering. We play with it