Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing - Y Combinator Startup Podcast  ## Metadata - Author: **Y Combinator Startup Podcast** - Full Title: Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/572194cf-8ba7-4c59-a7f8-981bf25b2fd3 ## Highlights - **Software Evolution** - Andrej Karpathy believes it's a unique time to enter the software industry because software is changing fundamentally again. - Software hasn't changed much in 70 years, but has changed twice rapidly in recent years, creating a lot of work to rewrite it. Transcript: Andrej Karpathy 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 software is changing, again. And I say again because I actually gave this talk already, 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. This is kind of like all the software that's written. These are instructions to the computer for carrying out tasks in the digital space. So if you zoom in here, these are ([Time 0:00:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c4090460-03b7-46e5-b0aa-dc05a896f404)) - **LLMs as Utilities** - Andrej Karpathy believes LLMs feel like utilities because of their properties. - LLM labs spend CapEx to train the models and OpEx to serve that intelligence over APIs. Transcript: Andrej Karpathy Like what is this new computer? What does it look like and what does the ecosystem look like? I was struck by this quote from Andrew actually many years ago now, I think, and I think Andrew is going to be speaking right after me, but he said at the time AI is the new electricity, and I do think that it kind of captures something very interesting in that LLMs certainly feel like they have properties of utilities right now. So LLM labs like OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropica, 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. ([Time 0:06:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a1436c0e-9292-4db9-b40c-3166bca54593)) - **Menugen** - Andrej Karpathy found that the code was the easy part when Vibe coding Menugen. - Making it real with authentication, payments, a domain name, and virtual deployment was the hard part. Transcript: Andrej Karpathy The fascinating thing about Menugen for me is that the code, the Vibe coding part, the code, was actually the easy part of Vibe coding Menugen. 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 the virtual deployment, this was really hard And all of this was not code. All of this DevOps stuff was me in the browser clicking stuff. And this was extreme slog and took another week. So it was really fascinating that I had the menu gen 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. So for example, if you try to add Google login to your webpage, 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 drop down, 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? 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. Okay. So roughly speaking, I think there's a new category of consumer and manipulator of digital information. ([Time 0:32:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/641096bd-680a-42d7-bf97-37282ef4e8c5))