OpenAI founder admits AI isn’t working
In a Nutshell
Karpathy admits that while AI coding tools produce working code, the output is bloated, brittle, and full of poor abstractions that often require him to intervene to avoid serious errors. He describes his workflow of writing highly detailed specs to guide the AI, yet still finds the models unable to simplify or reason beyond their training data, revealing them as sophisticated autocomplete systems rather than true engineers. The core takeaway is that current frontier AI lacks reliable reasoning and code quality, making agentic workflows risky for critical applications like healthcare or finance despite the hype.
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Andre Karpathy, one of the founders of OpenAI, helped invent the modern AI stack and coined the term vibe coding. At a conference, he described using AI coding tools and how he has stopped checking their output. He explained that he used to correct the output constantly, but now he does not. He presented this as a productivity progression where the tip is to give up on reviewing the code.
Immediately after this story, Karpathy shared a contrasting observation. He noted that these models can refactor a 100,000-line codebase and perform incredible software engineering tasks, yet they fail at simple tasks like counting the number of Rs in the word "strawberry" or deciding whether to drive or walk to a car wash. He asked how this discrepancy is possible.
Karpathy gave an example from an app he was working on called Menu Genen. An agent made an assumption about reusing emails that did not make sense. He stated that if he had not caught this error, it would have been really catastrophic. He presented this as a charming personal anecdote about how agents do silly things.
The speaker emphasizes that these mistakes are not funny because the same technology is supposed to replace doctors and handle taxes. In a moment of honesty, Karpathy said that when he actually looks at the code, sometimes he gets a little bit of a heart attack because it is not super amazing code. The code is very bloaty, with a lot of copy-paste and awkward abstractions that are brittle. It works, but it is just really gross.
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