alt Hacker NewsI hated these sentences way before LLMs, at least in the context of an explanation.
> it's not just a website you go like Google, it's a little spirit/ghost that "lives" on your computer
This type of sentence, I call rhetorical fat. Get rid of this fat and you obtain a boring sentence that repeats what has been said in the previous one.
Not all rhetorical fats are equal, and I must admit I find myself eyerolling on the "little spirit" part more than about the fatness.
I understand the author wants to decorate things and emphasize key elements, and the hate I feel is only caused by the incompatible projection of my ideals to a text that doesn't belong to me.
> it's not just about the image generation itself, it's about the joint capability coming from text generation.
That's unjustified conceptual stress.
That could be a legitimate answer to a question ("No, no, it's not just about that, it's more about this"), but it's a text. Maybe the text wants you to be focused, maybe the text wants to hype you; this is the shape of the hype without the hype.
"I find image generation is cooler when paired with text generation."
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Karpathy should go back to what he does best: educating people about AI on a deep level. Running experiments and sharing how they work, that sort of stuff. It seems lately he is closer to an influencer who reviews AI-based products. Hopefully it is not too late to go back.
It is not a decoration. Karpathy juxtaposes ChatGPT (which feels like a "better google" to most people) to Claude Code, which, apparently, feels different to him. It's a comparison between the two.
You might find this statement non-informative, but without two parts there's no comparison. That's really the semantics of the statement which Karpathy is trying to express.
ChatGPT-ish "it's not just" is annoying because the first part is usually a strawman, something reader considers trite. But it's not the case here.