Modern LLM cloud infrastructure mirrors 1960s mainframe time-sharing
Andrej Karpathy · Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again) · Y Combinator · Jun 19, 2025 · at 11:01
Andrej Karpathy compares modern cloud-hosted AI APIs to 1960s computing architecture at Y Combinator's AI Startup School.
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“We're kind of like in this 19 sixties-ish 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 sort of thin 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 during this time.”
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