The Road to Autonomous Intelligence with Andrej Karpathy

**Sarah** (0:05)
Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today, we're hanging out with Andrej Karpathy, who needs no introduction. Andrej is a renowned researcher, beloved AI educator and cuber, an early team member from OpenAI, the lead for autopilot at Tesla, and now working on AI for education. We'll talk to him about the state of research, his new company, and what we can expect from AI.

**Elad** (0:29)
Thanks a lot for joining us today. It's great to have you here.

**Andrej Karpathy** (0:31)
Thank you. I'm happy to be here.

**Sarah** (0:33)
You led autopilot at Tesla, and now we actually have fully self-driving cars, passenger vehicles on the road. How do you read that in terms of where we are in the capability set, how quickly we should see increased capability or pervasive passenger vehicles?

**Andrej Karpathy** (0:48)
Yeah, so I spent maybe five years on self-driving space. I think it's a fascinating space. And basically what's happening in the field right now is, well, I do also think that I draw a lot of analogies, I would say, to AGI from self-driving. And maybe that's just because I'm familiar with it. But I kind of feel like we've reached AGI a little bit in self-driving, because there are systems today that you can basically take around and as a paying customer can take around here. So Waymo in San Francisco here is of course very common. Probably you've taken Waymo, I've taken it a bunch and it's amazing. And it can drive you all over the place and you're paying for it as a product. What's interesting with Waymo is the first time I took Waymo was actually a decade ago, almost exactly 2014 or so. And it was a friend of mine who worked there and he gave me a demo. And it drove me around the block 10 years ago. And it was basically perfect drive 10 years ago. And it took 10 years to go from like a demo that I had to a product I can pay for that's in the city scale and it's expanding, etc.

**Elad** (1:39)
How much of that do you think was regulatory versus technology? Like when do you think that technology was ready?

**Andrej Karpathy** (1:43)
I think it's technology, you're just not seeing it in a single demo drive of 30 minutes. You're not running into all the stuff that they had to deal with for a decade. And so demo and product, there's a massive gap there. And I think a lot of it also regulatory, etc. But I do think that we've sort of like achieved AGI in the self-driving space in that sense a little bit. And yet I think there's what's really fascinating about it is the globalization hasn't happened at all. So you have a demo and you can take it in itself. But like the world hasn't changed yet. And that's going to take a long time. And so going from a demo to an actual globalization of it, I think there's a big gap there. That's how it's related, I would say, to AGI, because I suspect it looks in a similar way for AGI when we sort of get it. And then staying for a minute in the self-driving space, I think people think that Waymo is ahead of Tesla. I think personally Tesla is ahead of Waymo, and I know it doesn't look like that, but I'm still very bullish on Tesla and its self-driving program. I think that Tesla has a software problem, and I think Waymo has a hardware problem, is the way I put it, and I think software problems are much easier. Tesla has a deployment of all these cars on Earth, like at scale, and I think Waymo needs to get there. And so the moment Tesla sort of like gets to the point where they can actually deploy this and it actually works, I think it's going to be really incredible. The latest builds I just drove yesterday, I mean, it's just driving me all over the place. Now, they've made like really good improvements, I would say, very recently.

**Elad** (2:59)
Yeah, I've been using it a lot recently, and it actually works quite well.

**Andrej Karpathy** (3:02)
It did some miraculous driving for me yesterday, so I'm very impressed with what the team is doing. And so I still think that Tesla mostly has a software problem, Waymo mostly hardware problem. And so I think Tesla, Waymo looks like it's winning kind of right now, but I think when we look in 10 years, and who's actually at scale, and where most of the revenue is coming from, I still think they're ahead in that sense.

**Elad** (3:22)