2024: everyone releasing their own Chat 2025: everyone releasing their own Code - Andrej Karpathy

Suddenly upset that for every piece of content I come across I can't immediately check in with my AI book club to see what they think about it.

Input optional product

Don't ask your users for input. Coming up with input is hard, and a barrier to use. Think of users as wanting to play. We have AI - predict the input! Design products into autonomous environments. Allow users to play by steering a bit.

Don't think of LLMs as entities but as simulators. For example, when exploring a topic, don't ask:

"What do you think about xyz"?

There is no "you". Next time try:

"What would be a good group of people to explore xyz? What would they say?"

The LLM can channel/simulate many perspectives but it hasn't "thought about" xyz for a while and over time and formed its own opinions in the way we're used to. If you force it via the use of "you", it will give you something by adopting a personality embedding vector implied by the statistics of its finetuning data and then simulate that. It's fine to do, but there is a lot less mystique to it than I find people naively attribute to "asking an AI".