Karpathy: AutoResearch is limited strictly to domains with easily evaluatable objective metrics
Andrej Karpathy · Skill Issue: Andrej Karpathy on Code Agents, AutoResearch, and the Loopy Era of AI · Mar 20, 2026 · at 23:45
Andrej Karpathy discusses the technical constraints and boundaries of his AutoResearch project and autonomous AI coding agents on No Priors with Sarah Guo.
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“This is extremely well suited to anything that has objective metrics that are easy to evaluate. So for example, like writing kernels for more efficient CUDA, you know, code for various parts of a model, etc., are the perfect fit. Because you have inefficient code, and then you want efficient code that has the exact same behavior, but it's much faster. Perfect fit. So a lot of things like, are perfect fit for auto research, but many things will not be. And so they, it's just, if you can't evaluate it, then you can't auto research it, right?”
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