Animals vs Ghosts | karpathy

Today's frontier LLM research is not about building animals. It is about summoning ghosts. And a bit more on Sutton's Dwarkesh pod.

Animals vs Ghosts – karpathy Animals vs Ghosts 01 Oct, 2025 Finally had a chance to listen through this Dwarkesh pod with Sutton , which was interesting and amusing. As background, Sutton's " The Bitter Lesson " has become a bit of biblical text in frontier LLM circles. Researchers routinely talk about and ask whether this or that approach or idea is sufficiently "bitter lesson pilled" (meaning arranged so that it benefits from added computation for free) as a proxy for whether it's going to work or worth even pursuing. The underlying assumption being that LLMs are of course highly "bitter les

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