OpenAI Co-founder Challenges AI Hype: Models Fall Short

Published Date : 22/10/2025 

Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI, has sparked a debate by asserting that the race to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI) is moving much slower than the hype suggests. Despite rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs), Karpathy believes AGI is at least a decade away. 

Andrej Karpathy, one of the most influential figures in modern artificial intelligence and a founding member of OpenAI, has sent shockwaves through the tech world with a sobering assessment of the industry’s progress toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). In a widely shared interview with podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, a YouTuber with over 1 million followers, Karpathy stated that the race to build AGI is moving significantly slower than the hype suggests.

Despite rapid advances in large language models (LLMs) over the past three years, Karpathy argued that AGI remains at least a decade away. He warned that many companies are exaggerating AI’s capabilities, which could damage the field. “Overall, the models are not there,” Karpathy said on the podcast. “I feel like the industry is making too big of a jump and is trying to pretend like this is amazing, and it’s not. It’s slop.”

The interview triggered an immediate reaction across the tech community, where expectations for AGI have soared alongside capital investment and competition. Prithvir Jhaveri, CEO of prediction markets aggregator TradeFox, wrote on X, “If this Karpathy interview doesn’t pop the AI bubble, nothing will.” John Coogan, host of the tech podcast TBPN, noted that Karpathy’s interview came just weeks after AI pioneer Richard Sutton called LLMs a “dead end.” “The general tech community is experiencing whiplash right now,” Coogan wrote on X.

Karpathy, who previously served as Tesla’s senior director of AI and helped lead OpenAI in its early years, described his AI timeline as “five to ten times pessimistic” compared to many public predictions. However, he rejected the idea that his prediction, that it will take a decade to achieve AGI, is gloomy. “Ten years,” he wrote on X after the interview, “should otherwise be a very bullish timeline for AGI.”

For Silicon Valley, it’s a slow projection. Sam Altman, Karpathy’s fellow OpenAI co-founder and current CEO, predicts that artificial intelligence will surpass the intelligence of any human in any specialty by 2030. Elon Musk has predicted that AGI will come either this year or the next. Karpathy argued that much of the confusion stems from metrics that give an inflated sense of capability. Public demos, benchmark competitions, chatbot conversations, and code-generation tests tend to reflect narrow optimizations, he said, rather than addressing the hardest unsolved problems in AI. Those include long-horizon planning, structured reasoning, and, ultimately, safe system design.

Karpathy reserved his strongest criticism for AI “agents,” a concept that has exploded across the industry in recent months. These systems, built on top of LLMs, are pitched as autonomous digital workers that can write and run code, search the internet, operate software, and execute business tasks with minimal oversight. Karpathy said the idea is promising, but the execution, at least how it stands today, is far from reliable. “We’re at this intermediate stage,” Karpathy said. “The models are amazing. They still need a lot of work.”

Many other AI leaders are much more bullish. For example, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has called 2025 “the year of AI agents.” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently said that by 2026 or 2027, AI systems will be “better than almost all humans at almost all things.” But most current AI agent systems produce brittle, unpredictable results and lack basic reliability, Karpathy warned. He argued they do not possess enough reasoning ability, have limited perceptions of software environments, and struggle to use tools correctly. “If this isn’t done well,” Karpathy said, “we might end up with mountains of slop accumulating across software, and an increase in vulnerabilities and security breaches.”

Still, he insisted AI remains on a long but solvable path. The technical challenges ahead are difficult, he said, but manageable with time, research, and better safety practices. “I feel like the problems are surmountable,” he said. “But they’re still difficult.” 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQS): 

Q: What is Andrej Karpathy's current stance on AGI?

A: Andrej Karpathy believes that the race to achieve AGI is moving much slower than the hype suggests. He argues that AGI is at least a decade away and that many companies are exaggerating AI’s capabilities.

Q: Why did Karpathy's comments cause a stir in the tech community?

A: Karpathy's comments caused a stir because they challenged the optimistic predictions and hype surrounding AGI. His realistic assessment of the current state of AI models and the challenges ahead has led to a reassessment of expectations in the tech community.

Q: What are some of the key challenges in achieving AGI, according to Karpathy?

A: Karpathy highlighted several key challenges, including long-horizon planning, structured reasoning, and safe system design. He also criticized the current state of AI agents, which he believes are far from reliable and often produce brittle, unpredictable results.

Q: How do Karpathy's predictions compare to those of other AI leaders?

A: Karpathy's predictions are more pessimistic compared to other AI leaders. For example, Sam Altman predicts that AI will surpass human intelligence by 2030, and Elon Musk believes AGI will come within the next year or two.

Q: What does Karpathy say about the future of AI?

A: Karpathy remains optimistic about the future of AI, stating that the technical challenges are surmountable. However, he emphasizes the need for more time, research, and better safety practices to address the current limitations and challenges. 

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