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Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again)

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Please welcome former director of AI

Tesla Andre Carpathy. [Music]

[Music] Hello.

Wow, a lot of people here. Hello.

Um, okay. Yeah. So I'm excited to be

here today to talk to you about software

in the era of AI. And I'm told that many

of you are students like bachelors,

masters, PhD and so on. And you're about

to enter the industry. And I think it's

actually like an extremely unique and

very interesting time to enter the

industry right now. And I think

fundamentally the reason for that is

that um software is changing uh again.

And I say again because I actually gave

this talk already. Um but the problem is

that software keeps changing. So I

actually have a lot of material to

create new talks and I think it's

changing quite fundamentally. I think

roughly speaking software has not

changed much on such a fundamental level

for 70 years. And then it's changed I

think about twice quite rapidly in the

last few years. And so there's just a

huge amount of work to do a huge amount

of software to write and rewrite. So

let's take a look at maybe the realm of

software. So if we kind of think of this

as like the map of software this is a

really cool tool called map of GitHub.

Um this is kind of like all the software

that's written. Uh these are

instructions to the computer for

carrying out tasks in the digital space.

So if you zoom in here, these are all

different kinds of repositories and this

is all the code that has been written.

And a few years ago I kind of observed

that um software was kind of changing

and there was kind of like a new type of

software around and I called this

software 2.0 at the time and the idea

here was that software 1.0 is the code

you write for the computer. Software 2.0

know are basically neural networks and

in particular the weights of a neural

network and you're not writing this code

directly you are most you are more kind

of like tuning the data sets and then

you're running an optimizer to create to

create the parameters of this neural net

and I think like at the time neural nets

were kind of seen as like just a

different kind of classifier like a

decision tree or something like that and

so I think it was kind of like um I

think this framing was a lot more

appropriate and now actually what we

have is kind of like an equivalent of

GitHub in the realm of software 2.0 And

I think the hugging face is basically

equivalent of GitHub in software 2.0.

And there's also model atlas and you can

visualize all the code written there. In

case you're curious, by the way, the

giant circle, the point in the middle,

uh these are the parameters of flux, the

image generator. And so anytime someone

tunes a on top of a flux model, you

basically create a git commit uh in this

space and uh you create a different kind

of a image generator. So basically what

we have is software 1.0 is the computer

code that programs a computer. Software

2.0 are the weights which program neural

networks. Uh and here's an example of

Alexet image recognizer neural network.

Now so far all of the neural networks

that we've been familiar with until

recently where kind of like fixed

function computers image to categories

or something like that. And I think

what's changed and I think is a quite

fundamental change is that neural

networks became programmable with large

language models. And so I I see this as

quite new, unique. It's a new kind of a

computer and uh so in my mind it's uh

worth giving it a new designation of

software 3.0. And basically your prompts

are now programs that program the LLM.

And uh remarkably uh these uh prompts

are written in English. So it's kind of

a very interesting programming language.

Um so maybe uh to summarize the

difference if you're doing sentiment

classification for example you can

imagine writing some uh amount of Python

to to basically do sentiment

classification or you can train a neural

net or you can prompt a large language

model. Uh so here this is a few short

prompt and you can imagine changing it

and programming the computer in a

slightly different way. So basically we

have software 1.0 software 2.0 and I

think we're seeing maybe you've seen a

lot of GitHub code is not just like code

anymore. there's a bunch of like English

interspersed with code and so I think

kind of there's a growing category of

new kind of code. So not only is it a

new programming paradigm, it's also

remarkable to me that it's in our native

language of English. And so when this

blew my mind a few uh I guess years ago

now I tweeted this and um I think it

captured the attention of a lot of

people and this is my currently pinned

tweet uh is that remarkably we're now

programming computers in English. Now,

when I was at uh Tesla, um we were

working on the uh autopilot and uh we

were trying to get the car to drive and

I sort of showed this slide at the time

where you can imagine that the inputs to

the car are on the bottom and they're

going through a software stack to

produce the steering and acceleration

and I made the observation at the time

that there was a ton of C++ code around

in the autopilot which was the software

1.0 code and then there was some neural

nets in there doing image recognition

and uh I kind of observed that over time

as we made the autopilot better

basically the neural network grew in

capability and size and in addition to

that all the C++ code was being deleted

and kind of like was um and a lot of the

kind of capabilities and functionality

that was originally written in 1.0 was

migrated to 2.0. So as an example, a lot

of the stitching up of information

across images from the different cameras

and across time was done by a neural

network and we were able to delete a lot

of code and so the software 2.0 stack

quite literally ate through the software

stack of the autopilot. So I thought

this was really remarkable at the time

and I think we're seeing the same thing

again where uh basically we have a new

kind of software and it's eating through

the stack. We have three completely

different programming paradigms and I

think if you're entering the industry

it's a very good idea to be fluent in

all of them because they all have slight

pros and cons and you may want to

program some functionality in 1.0 or 2.0

or 3.0. Are you going to train

neurallet? Are you going to just prompt

an LLM? Should this be a piece of code

that's explicit etc. So we all have to

make these decisions and actually

potentially uh fluidly trans transition

between these paradigms. So what I

wanted to get into now is first I want

to in the first part talk about LLMs and

how to kind of like think of this new

paradigm and the ecosystem and what that

looks like. Uh like what are what is

this new computer? What does it look

like and what does the ecosystem look

like? Um I was struck by this quote from

Anduring actually uh many years ago now

I think and I think Andrew is going to

be speaking right after me. Uh but he

said at the time AI is the new

electricity and I do think that it um

kind of captures something very

interesting in that LLMs certainly feel

like they have properties of utilities

right now. So

um LLM labs like OpenAI, Gemini,

Enthropic etc. They spend capex to train

the LLMs and this is kind of equivalent

to building out a grid and then there's

opex to serve that intelligence over

APIs to all of us and this is done

through metered access where we pay per

million tokens or something like that

and we have a lot of demands that are

very utility- like demands out of this

API we demand low latency high uptime

consistent quality etc. In electricity,

you would have a transfer switch. So you

can transfer your electricity source

from like grid and solar or battery or

generator. In LLM, we have maybe open

router and easily switch between the

different types of LLMs that exist.

Because the LLM are software, they don't

compete for physical space. So it's okay

to have basically like six electricity

providers and you can switch between

them, right? Because they don't compete

in such a direct way. And I think what's

also a little fascinating and we saw

this in the last few days actually a lot

of the LLMs went down and people were

kind of like stuck and unable to work.

And uh I think it's kind of fascinating

to me that when the state-of-the-art

LLMs go down, it's actually kind of like

an intelligence brownout in the world.

It's kind of like when the voltage is

unreliable in the grid and uh the planet

just gets dumber the more reliance we

have on these models, which already is

like really dramatic and I think will

continue to grow. But LLM's don't only

have properties of utilities. I think

it's also fair to say that they have

some properties of fabs. And the reason

for this is that the capex required for

building LLM is actually quite large. Uh

it's not just like building some uh

power station or something like that,

right? You're investing a huge amount of

money and I think the tech tree and uh

for the technology is growing quite

rapidly. So we're in a world where we

have sort of deep tech trees, research

and development secrets that are

centralizing inside the LLM labs. Um and

but I think the analogy muddies a little

bit also because as I mentioned this is

software and software is a bit less

defensible because it is so malleable.

And so um I think it's just an

interesting kind of thing to think about

potentially. There's many analogy

analogies you can make like a 4

nanometer process node maybe is

something like a cluster with certain

max flops. You can think about when

you're use when you're using Nvidia GPUs

and you're only doing the software and

you're not doing the hardware. That's

kind of like the fabless model. But if

you're actually also building your own

hardware and you're training on TPUs if

you're Google, that's kind of like the

Intel model where you own your fab. So I

think there's some analogies here that

make sense. But actually I think the

analogy that makes the most sense

perhaps is that in my mind LLM have very

strong kind of analogies to operating

systems. Uh in that this is not just

electricity or water. It's not something

that comes out of the tap as a

commodity. uh this is these are now

increasingly complex software ecosystems

right so uh they're not just like simple

commodities like electricity and it's

kind of interesting to me that the

ecosystem is shaping in a very similar

kind of way where you have a few closed

source providers like Windows or Mac OS

and then you have an open source

alternative like Linux and I think for u

neural for LLMs as well we have a kind

of a few competing closed source

providers and then maybe the llama

ecosystem is currently like maybe a

close approximation to something that

may grow into something like Linux.

Again, I think it's still very early

because these are just simple LLMs, but

we're starting to see that these are

going to get a lot more complicated.

It's not just about the LLM itself. It's

about all the tool use and the

multiodalities and how all of that

works. And so when I sort of had this

realization a while back, I tried to

sketch it out and it kind of seemed to

me like LLMs are kind of like a new

operating system, right? So the LLM is a

new kind of a computer. It's sitting

it's kind of like the CPU equivalent. uh

the context windows are kind of like the

memory and then the LLM is orchestrating

memory and compute uh for problem

solving um using all of these uh

capabilities here and so definitely if

you look at it looks very much like

operating system from that perspective.

Um, a few more analogies. For example,

if you want to download an app, say I go

to VS Code and I go to download, you can

download VS Code and you can run it on

Windows, Linux or or Mac in the same way

as you can take an LLM app like cursor

and you can run it on GPT or cloud or

Gemini series, right? It's just a drop

down. So, it's kind of like similar in

that way as well.

uh more analogies that I think strike me

is that we're kind of like in this 1960sish

1960sish

era where LLM compute is still very

expensive for this new kind of a

computer and that forces the LLMs to be

centralized in the cloud and we're all

just uh sort of thing clients that

interact with it over the network and

none of us have full utilization of

these computers and therefore it makes

sense to use time sharing where we're

all just you know a dimension of the

batch when they're running the computer

in the cloud. And this is very much what

computers used to look like at during

this time. The operating systems were in

the cloud. Everything was streamed

around and there was batching. And so

the p the personal computing revolution

hasn't happened yet because it's just

not economical. It doesn't make sense.

But I think some people are trying. And

it turns out that Mac minis, for

example, are a very good fit for some of

the LLMs because it's all if you're

doing batch one inference, this is all

super memory bound. So this actually works.

works.

And uh I think these are some early

indications maybe of personal computing.

Uh but this hasn't really happened yet.

It's not clear what this looks like.

Maybe some of you get to invent what

what this is or how it works or uh what

this should what this should be. Maybe

one more analogy that I'll mention is

whenever I talk to Chach or some LLM

directly in text, I feel like I'm

talking to an operating system through

the terminal. Like it's just it's it's

text. It's direct access to the

operating system. And I think a guey

hasn't yet really been invented in like

a general way like should chatt have a

guey like different than just a tech

bubbles. Uh certainly some of the apps

that we're going to go into in a bit

have guey but there's no like guey

across all the tasks if that makes

sense. Um there are some ways in which

LLMs are different from kind of

operating systems in some fairly unique

way and from early computing. And I

wrote about uh this one particular

property that strikes me as very

different uh this time around. It's that

LLMs like flip they flip the direction

of technology diffusion uh that is

usually uh present in technology. So for

example with electricity, cryptography,

computing, flight, internet, GPS, lots

of new transformative technologies that

have not been around. Typically it is

the government and corporations that are

the first users because it's new and

expensive etc. and it only later

diffuses to consumer. Uh, but I feel

like LLMs are kind of like flipped

around. So maybe with early computers,

it was all about ballistics and military

use, but with LLMs, it's all about how

do you boil an egg or something like

that. This is certainly like a lot of my

use. And so it's really fascinating to

me that we have a new magical computer

and it's like helping me boil an egg.

It's not helping the government do

something really crazy like some

military ballistics or some special

technology. Indeed, corporations are

governments are lagging behind the

adoption of all of us, of all of these

technologies. So, it's just backwards

and I think it informs maybe some of the

uses of how we want to use this

technology or like where are some of the

first apps and so on.

So, in summary so far, LLM labs LLMs. I

think it's accurate language to use, but

LLMs are complicated operating systems.

They're circa 1960s in computing and

we're redoing computing all over again.

and they're currently available via time

sharing and distributed like a utility.

What is new and unprecedented is that

they're not in the hands of a few

governments and corporations. They're in

the hands of all of us because we all

have a computer and it's all just

software and Chaship was beamed down to

our computers like billions of people

like instantly and overnight and this is

insane. Uh and it's kind of insane to me

that this is the case and now it is our

time to enter the industry and program

these computers. This is crazy. So I

think this is quite remarkable. Before

we program LLMs, we have to kind of like

spend some time to think about what

these things are. And I especially like

to kind of talk about their psychology.

So the way I like to think about LLMs is

that they're kind of like people

spirits. Um they are stoastic

simulations of people. Um and the

simulator in this case happens to be an

auto reggressive transformer. So

transformer is a neural net. Uh it's and

it just kind of like is goes on the

level of tokens. It goes chunk chunk

chunk chunk chunk. And there's an almost

equal amount of compute for every single

chunk. Um and um this simulator of

course is is just is basically there's

some weights involved and we fit it to

all of text that we have on the internet

and so on. And you end up with this kind

of a simulator and because it is trained

on humans, it's got this emergent

psychology that is humanlike. So the

first thing you'll notice is of course

uh LLM have encyclopedic knowledge and

memory. uh and they can remember lots of

things, a lot more than any single

individual human can because they read

so many things. It's it actually kind of

reminds me of this movie Rainman, which

I actually really recommend people

watch. It's an amazing movie. I love

this movie. Um and Dustin Hoffman here

is an autistic savant who has almost

perfect memory. So, he can read a he can

read like a phone book and remember all

of the names and phone numbers. And I

kind of feel like LM are kind of like

very similar. They can remember Shaw

hashes and lots of different kinds of

things very very easily. So they

certainly have superpowers in some set

in some respects. But they also have a

bunch of I would say cognitive deficits.

So they hallucinate quite a bit. Um and

they kind of make up stuff and don't

have a very good uh sort of internal

model of self-nowledge, not sufficient

at least. And this has gotten better but

not perfect. They display jagged

intelligence. So they're going to be

superhuman in some problems solving

domains. And then they're going to make

mistakes that basically no human will

make. like you know they will insist

that 9.11 is greater than 9.9 or that

there are two Rs in strawberry these are

some famous examples but basically there

are rough edges that you can trip on so

that's kind of I think also kind of

unique um they also kind of suffer from

entrograde amnesia um so uh and I think

I'm alluding to the fact that if you

have a co-orker who joins your

organization this co-orker will over

time learn your organization and uh they

will understand and gain like a huge

amount of context on the organization

and they go home and they sleep and they

consolidate knowledge and they develop

expertise over time. LLMs don't natively

do this and this is not something that

has really been solved in the R&D of

LLM. I think um and so context windows

are really kind of like working memory

and you have to sort of program the

working memory quite directly because

they don't just kind of like get smarter

by uh by default and I think a lot of

people get tripped up by the analogies

uh in this way. Uh in popular culture I

recommend people watch these two movies

uh Momento and 51st dates. In both of

these movies, the protagonists, their

weights are fixed and their context

windows gets wiped every single morning

and it's really problematic to go to

work or have relationships when this

happens and this happens to all the

time. I guess one more thing I would

point to is security kind of related

limitations of the use of LLM. So for

example, LLMs are quite gullible. Uh

they are susceptible to prompt injection

risks. They might leak your data etc.

And so um and there's many other

considerations uh security related. So,

so basically long story short, you have

to load your you have to load your you

have to simultaneously think through

this superhuman thing that has a bunch

of cognitive deficits and issues. How do

we and yet they are extremely like

useful and so how do we program them and

how do we work around their deficits and

enjoy their superhuman powers.

So what I want to switch to now is talk

about the opportunities of how do we use

these models and what are some of the

biggest opportunities. This is not a

comprehensive list just some of the

things that I thought were interesting

for this talk. The first thing I'm kind

of excited about is what I would call

partial autonomy apps. So for example,

let's work with the example of coding.

You can certainly go to chacht directly

and you can start copy pasting code

around and copyping bug reports and

stuff around and getting code and copy

pasting everything around. Why would you

why would you do that? Why would you go

directly to the operating system? It

makes a lot more sense to have an app

dedicated for this. And so I think many

of you uh use uh cursor. I do as well.

And uh cursor is kind of like the thing

you want instead. You don't want to just

directly go to the chash apt. And I

think cursor is a very good example of

an early LLM app that has a bunch of

properties that I think are um useful

across all the LLM apps. So in

particular, you will notice that we have

a traditional interface that allows a

human to go in and do all the work

manually just as before. But in addition

to that, we now have this LLM

integration that allows us to go in

bigger chunks. And so some of the

properties of LLM apps that I think are

shared and useful to point out. Number

one, the LLMs basically do a ton of the

context management. Um, number two, they

orchestrate multiple calls to LLMs,

right? So in the case of cursor, there's

under the hood embedding models for all

your files, the actual chat models,

models that apply diffs to the code, and

this is all orchestrated for you. A

really big one that uh I think also

maybe not fully appreciated always is

application specific uh GUI and the

importance of it. Um because you don't

just want to talk to the operating

system directly in text. Text is very

hard to read, interpret, understand and

also like you don't want to take some of

these actions natively in text. So it's

much better to just see a diff as like

red and green change and you can see

what's being added is subtracted. It's

much easier to just do command Y to

accept or command N to reject. I

shouldn't have to type it in text,

right? So, a guey allows a human to

audit the work of these fallible systems

and to go faster. I'm going to come back

to this point a little bit uh later as

well. And the last kind of feature I

want to point out is that there's what I

call the autonomy slider. So, for

example, in cursor, you can just do tap

completion. You're mostly in charge. You

can select a chunk of code and command K

to change just that chunk of code. You

can do command L to change the entire

file. Or you can do command I which just

you know let it rip do whatever you want

in the entire repo and that's the sort

of full autonomy agent agentic version

and so you are in charge of the autonomy

slider and depending on the complexity

of the task at hand you can uh tune the

amount of autonomy that you're willing

to give up uh for that task maybe to

show one more example of a fairly

successful LLM app uh perplexity um it

also has very similar features to what

I've just pointed out to in cursor uh it

packages up a lot of the information. It

orchestrates multiple LLMs. It's got a

GUI that allows you to audit some of its

work. So, for example, it will site

sources and you can imagine inspecting

them. And it's got an autonomy slider.

You can either just do a quick search or

you can do research or you can do deep

research and come back 10 minutes later.

So, this is all just varying levels of

autonomy that you give up to the tool.

So, I guess my question is I feel like a

lot of software will become partially

autonomous. I'm trying to think through

like what does that look like? And for

many of you who maintain products and

services, how are you going to make your

products and services partially

autonomous? Can an LLM see everything

that a human can see? Can an LLM act in

all the ways that a human could act? And

can humans supervise and stay in the

loop of this activity? Because again,

these are fallible systems that aren't

yet perfect. And what does a diff look

like in Photoshop or something like

that? You know, and also a lot of the

traditional software right now, it has

all these switches and all this kind of

stuff that's all designed for human. All

of this has to change and become

accessible to LLMs.

So, one thing I want to stress with a

lot of these LLM apps that I'm not sure

gets as much attention as it should is

um we we're now kind of like cooperating

with AIS and usually they are doing the

generation and we as humans are doing

the verification. It is in our interest

to make this loop go as fast as

possible. So, we're getting a lot of

work done. There are two major ways that

I think uh this can be done. Number one,

you can speed up verification a lot. Um,

and I think guies, for example, are

extremely important to this because a

guey utilizes your computer vision GPU

in all of our head. Reading text is

effortful and it's not fun, but looking

at stuff is fun and it's it's just a

kind of like a highway to your brain.

So, I think guies are very useful for

auditing systems and visual

representations in general. And number

two, I would say is we have to keep the

AI on the leash. We I think a lot of

people are getting way over excited with

AI agents and uh it's not useful to me

to get a diff of 10,000 lines of code to

my repo. Like I have to I'm still the

bottleneck, right? Even though that

10,00 lines come out instantly, I have

to make sure that this thing is not

introducing bugs. It's just like and

that it's doing the correct thing,

right? And that there's no security

issues and so on. So um I think that um

yeah basically you we have to sort of

like it's in our interest to make the

the flow of these two go very very fast

and we have to somehow keep the AI on

the leash because it gets way too

overreactive. It's uh it's kind of like

this. This is how I feel when I do AI

assisted coding. If I'm just bite coding

everything is nice and great but if I'm

actually trying to get work done it's

not so great to have an overreactive uh

agent doing all this kind of stuff. So

this slide is not very good. I'm sorry,

but I guess I'm trying to develop like

many of you some ways of utilizing these

agents in my coding workflow and to do

AI assisted coding. And in my own work,

I'm always scared to get way too big

diffs. I always go in small incremental

chunks. I want to make sure that

everything is good. I want to spin this

loop very very fast and um I sort of

work on small chunks of single concrete

thing. Uh and so I think many of you

probably are developing similar ways of

working with the with LLMs.

Um, I also saw a number of blog posts

that try to develop these best practices

for working with LLMs. And here's one

that I read recently and I thought was

quite good. And it kind of discussed

some techniques and some of them have to

do with how you keep the AI on the

leash. And so, as an example, if you are

prompting, if your prompt is vague, then

uh the AI might not do exactly what you

wanted and in that case, verification

will fail. You're going to ask for

something else. If a verification fails,

then you're going to start spinning. So

it makes a lot more sense to spend a bit

more time to be more concrete in your

prompts which increases the probability

of successful verification and you can

move forward. And so I think a lot of us

are going to end up finding um kind of

techniques like this. I think in my own

work as well I'm currently interested in

uh what education looks like in um

together with kind of like now that we

have AI uh and LLMs what does education

look like? And I think a a large amount

of thought for me goes into how we keep

AI on the leash. I don't think it just

works to go to chat and be like, "Hey,

teach me physics." I don't think this

works because the AI is like gets lost

in the woods. And so for me, this is

actually two separate apps. For example,

there's an app for a teacher that

creates courses and then there's an app

that takes courses and serves them to

students. And in both cases, we now have

this intermediate artifact of a course

that is auditable and we can make sure

it's good. We can make sure it's

consistent. and the AI is kept on the

leash with respect to a certain

syllabus, a certain like um progression

of projects and so on. And so this is

one way of keeping the AI on leash and I

think has a much higher likelihood of

working and the AI is not getting lost

in the woods.

One more kind of analogy I wanted to

sort of allude to is I'm not I'm no

stranger to partial autonomy and I kind

of worked on this I think for five years

at Tesla and this is also a partial

autonomy product and shares a lot of the

features like for example right there in

the instrument panel is the GUI of the

autopilot so it's showing me what the

what the neural network sees and so on

and we have the autonomy slider where

over the course of my tenure there we

did more and more autonomous tasks for

the user and maybe the story that I

wanted to tell very briefly is uh

actually the first time I drove a

self-driving vehicle was in 2013 and I

had a friend who worked at Whimo and uh

he offered to give me a drive around

Palo Alto. I took this picture using

Google Glass at the time and many of you

are so young that you might not even

know what that is. Uh but uh yeah, this

was like all the rage at the time. And

we got into this car and we went for

about a 30-minute drive around Palo Alto

highways uh streets and so on. And this

drive was perfect. There was zero

interventions and this was 2013 which is

now 12 years ago. And it kind of struck

me because at the time when I had this

perfect drive, this perfect demo, I felt

like, wow, self-driving is imminent

because this just worked. This is

incredible. Um, but here we are 12 years

later and we are still working on

autonomy. Um, we are still working on

driving agents and even now we haven't

actually like really solved the problem.

like you may see Whimos going around and

they look driverless but you know

there's still a lot of teleoperation and

a lot of human in the loop of a lot of

this driving so we still haven't even

like declared success but I think it's

definitely like going to succeed at this

point but it just took a long time and

so I think like like this is software is

really tricky I think in the same way

that driving is tricky and so when I see

things like oh 2025 is the year of

agents I get very concerned and I kind

of feel like you know this is the decade

of agents and this is going to be quite

some time. We need humans in the loop.

We need to do this carefully. This is

software. Let's be serious here. One

more kind of analogy that I always think

through is the Iron Man suit. Uh I think

this is I always love Iron Man. I think

it's like so um correct in a bunch of

ways with respect to technology and how

it will play out. And what I love about

the Iron Man suit is that it's both an

augmentation and Tony Stark can drive it

and it's also an agent. And in some of

the movies, the Iron Man suit is quite

autonomous and can fly around and find

Tony and all this kind of stuff. And so

this is the autonomy slider is we can be

we can build augmentations or we can

build agents and we kind of want to do a

bit of both. But at this stage I would

say working with fallible LLMs and so

on. I would say you know it's less Iron

Man robots and more Iron Man suits that

you want to build. It's less like

building flashy demos of autonomous

agents and more building partial

autonomy products. And these products

have custom gueies and UIUX. And we're

trying to um and this is done so that

the generation verification loop of the

human is very very fast. But we are not

losing the sight of the fact that it is

in principle possible to automate this

work. And there should be an autonomy

slider in your product. And you should

be thinking about how you can slide that

autonomy slider and make your product uh

sort of um more autonomous over time.

But this is kind of how I think there's

lots of opportunities in these kinds of

products. I want to now switch gears a

little bit and talk about one other

dimension that I think is very unique.

Not only is there a new type of

programming language that allows for

autonomy in software but also as I

mentioned it's programmed in English

which is this natural interface and

suddenly everyone is a programmer

because everyone speaks natural language

like English. So this is extremely

bullish and very interesting to me and

also completely unprecedented. I would

say it it used to be the case that you

need to spend five to 10 years studying

something to be able to do something in

software. this is not the case anymore.

So, I don't know if by any chance anyone

has heard of vibe coding.

Uh, this this is the tweet that kind of

like introduced this, but I'm told that

this is now like a major meme. Um, fun

story about this is that I've been on

Twitter for like 15 years or something

like that at this point and I still have

no clue which tweet will become viral

and which tweet like fizzles and no one

cares. And I thought that this tweet was

going to be the latter. I don't know. It

was just like a shower of thoughts. But

this became like a total meme and I

really just can't tell. But I guess like

it struck a chord and it gave a name to

something that everyone was feeling but

couldn't quite say in words. So now

there's a Wikipedia page and everything.

This is like [Applause]

[Applause]

yeah this is like a major contribution

now or something like that. So,

um, so Tom Wolf from HuggingFace shared

this beautiful video that I really love. Um,

Um,

And I find that this is such a wholesome

video. Like, I love this video. Like,

how can you look at this video and feel

bad about the future? The future is great.

great.

I think this will end up being like a

gateway drug to software development.

Um, I'm not a doomer about the future of

the generation and I think yeah, I love

this video. So, I tried by coding a

little bit uh as well because it's so

fun. Uh, so bike coding is so great when

you want to build something super duper

custom that doesn't appear to exist and

you just want to wing it because it's a

Saturday or something like that. So, I

built this uh iOS app and I don't I

can't actually program in Swift, but I

was really shocked that I was able to

build like a super basic app and I'm not

going to explain it. It's really uh

dumb, but uh I kind of like this was

just like a day of work and this was

running on my phone like later that day

and I was like, "Wow, this is amazing."

I didn't have to like read through Swift

for like five days or something like

that to like get started. I also

vipcoded this app called Menu Genen. And

this is live. You can try it in

menu.app. And I basically had this

problem where I show up at a restaurant,

I read through the menu, and I have no

idea what any of the things are. And I

need pictures. So this doesn't exist. So

I was like, "Hey, I'm going to bite code

it." So, um, this is what it looks like.

You go to menu.app,

um, and, uh, you take a picture of a of

a menu and then menu generates the

images and everyone gets $5 in credits

for free when you sign up. And

therefore, this is a major cost center

in my life. So, this is a negative

negative uh, revenue app for me right now.

now.

I've lost a huge amount of money on menu.

menu.

Okay. But the fascinating thing about

menu genen for me is that the code of

the v the vite coding part the code was

actually the easy part of v of v coding

menu and most of it actually was when I

tried to make it real so that you can

actually have authentication and

payments and the domain name and averal

deployment. This was really hard and all

of this was not code. All of this devops

stuff was in me in the browser clicking

stuff and this was extreme slo and took

another week. So it was really

fascinating that I had the menu genen um

basically demo working on my laptop in a

few hours and then it took me a week

because I was trying to make it real and

the reason for this is this was just

really annoying. Um, so for example, if

you try to add Google login to your web

page, I know this is very small, but

just a huge amount of instructions of

this clerk library telling me how to

integrate this. And this is crazy. Like

it's telling me go to this URL, click on

this dropdown, choose this, go to this,

and click on that. And it's like telling

me what to do. Like a computer is

telling me the actions I should be

taking. Like you do it. Why am I doing this?

this?

What the hell?

I had to follow all these instructions.

This was crazy. So I think the last part

of my talk therefore focuses on can we

just build for agents? I don't want to

do this work. Can agents do this? Thank you.

you.

Okay. So roughly speaking, I think

there's a new category of consumer and

manipulator of digital information. It

used to be just humans through GUIs or

computers through APIs. And now we have

a completely new thing and agents are

they're computers but they are humanlike

kind of right they're people spirits

there's people spirits on the internet

and they need to interact with our

software infrastructure like can we

build for them it's a new thing so as an

example you can have robots.txt on your

domain and you can instruct uh or like

advise I suppose um uh web crawlers on

how to behave on your website in the

same way you can have maybe lm.txt txt

file which is just a simple markdown

that's telling LLMs what this domain is

about and this is very readable to a to

an LLM. If it had to instead get the

HTML of your web page and try to parse

it, this is very errorprone and

difficult and will screw it up and it's

not going to work. So we can just

directly speak to the LLM. It's worth

it. Um a huge amount of documentation is

currently written for people. So you

will see things like lists and bold and

pictures and this is not directly

accessible by an LLM. So I see some of

the services now are transitioning a lot

of the their docs to be specifically for

LLMs. So Versell and Stripe as an

example are early movers here but there

are a few more that I've seen already

and they offer their documentation in

markdown. Markdown is super easy for LMS

to understand. This is great. Um maybe

one simple example from from uh my

experience as well. Maybe some of you

know three blue one brown. He makes

beautiful animation videos on YouTube. [Applause]

Yeah, I love this library. So that he

wrote uh Manon and I wanted to make my

own and uh there's extensive

documentations on how to use manon and

so I didn't want to actually read

through it. So I copy pasted the whole

thing to an LLM and I described what I

wanted and it just worked out of the box

like LLM just bcoded me an animation

exactly what I wanted and I was like wow

this is amazing. So if we can make docs

legible to LLMs, it's going to unlock a

huge amount of um kind of use and um I

think this is wonderful and should

should happen more. The other thing I

wanted to point out is that you do

unfortunately have to it's not just

about taking your docs and making them

appear in markdown. That's the easy

part. We actually have to change the

docs because anytime your docs say click

this is bad. An LLM will not be able to

natively take this action right now. So,

Verscell, for example, is replacing

every occurrence of click with an

equivalent curl command that your LM

agent could take on your behalf. Um, and

so I think this is very interesting. And

then, of course, there's a model context

protocol from Enthropic. And this is

also another way, it's a protocol of

speaking directly to agents as this new

consumer and manipulator of digital

information. So, I'm very bullish on

these ideas. The other thing I really

like is a number of little tools here

and there that are helping ingest data

that in like very LLM friendly formats.

So for example, when I go to a GitHub

repo like my nanoGPT repo, I can't feed

this to an LLM and ask questions about

it uh because it's you know this is a

human interface on GitHub. So when you

just change the URL from GitHub to get

ingest then uh this will actually

concatenate all the files into a single

giant text and it will create a

directory structure etc. And this is

ready to be copy pasted into your

favorite LLM and you can do stuff. Maybe

even more dramatic example of this is

deep wiki where it's not just the raw

content of these files. uh this is from

Devon but also like they have Devon

basically do analysis of the GitHub repo

and Devon basically builds up a whole

docs uh pages just for your repo and you

can imagine that this is even more

helpful to copy paste into your LLM. So

I love all the little tools that

basically where you just change the URL

and it makes something accessible to an

LLM. So this is all well and great and u

I think there should be a lot more of

it. One more note I wanted to make is

that it is absolutely possible that in

the future LLMs will be able to this is

not even future this is today they'll be

able to go around and they'll be able to

click stuff and so on but I still think

it's very worth u basically meeting LLM

halfway LLM's halfway and making it

easier for them to access all this

information uh because this is still

fairly expensive I would say to use and

uh a lot more difficult and so I do

think that lots of software there will

be a long tail where it won't like adapt

apps because these are not like live

player sort of repositories or digital

infrastructure and we will need these

tools. Uh but I think for everyone else

I think it's very worth kind of like

meeting in some middle point. So I'm

bullish on both if that makes sense.

So in summary, what an amazing time to

get into the industry. We need to

rewrite a ton of code. A ton of code

will be written by professionals and by

coders. These LLMs are kind of like

utilities, kind of like fabs, but

they're kind of especially like

operating systems. But it's so early.

It's like 1960s of operating systems and

uh and I think a lot of the analogies

cross over. Um and these LMS are kind of

like these fallible uh you know people

spirits that we have to learn to work

with. And in order to do that properly,

we need to adjust our infrastructure

towards it. So when you're building

these LLM apps, I describe some of the

ways of working effectively with these

LLMs and some of the tools that make

that uh kind of possible and how you can

spin this loop very very quickly and

basically create partial tunneling

products and then um yeah, a lot of code

has to also be written for the agents

more directly. But in any case, going

back to the Iron Man suit analogy, I

think what we'll see over the next

decade roughly is we're going to take

the slider from left to right. And I'm

very interesting. It's going to be very

interesting to see what that looks like.

And I can't wait to build it with all of

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