Andrej Karpathy outlines the core interaction model for Software 3.0 applications at Y Combinator's AI Startup School.
Insight
LLMs invert historical tech diffusion by reaching consumers before enterprise
“LLMs, like, flip, they flip the direction of technology diffusion, ah, that is usually, ah, present in technology. So, for example, with electricity, cryptography, computing, flight, internet, GPS, lots of new transformative technologies that have not been aro…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Waymo autonomous vehicles still rely heavily on human teleoperation
“Like, you may see Waymo's 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.”
Opinion
2025 is not the year of AI agents, it is the decade
“When I see things like, oh, twenty-twenty-five 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.”
Insight
Developers should build Iron Man suits, not fully autonomous robots
“Working with valuable 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”
Insight
LLMs establish Software 3.0 where natural language prompts are programs
“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 see this as quite new, unique. It's a new kind of a computer. And so in my mind, it's worth giving it a new…”
Insight
LLMs function as CPUs and operating systems orchestrating context memory
“LLMs are kind of like a new operating system, right? So, the LLM is a new kind of a computer. It's setting, it's kind of like the CPU equivalent. The context windows are kind of like the memory, and then the LLM is orchestrating memory and compute for problem …”