Despite rapid advances in large language models (LLMs) over the past three years, he argued AGI remains at least a decade away, and warned that many companies are exaggerating AI’s agentic capabilities in a way that 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.
“The general tech community is experiencing whiplash right now,” Coogan wrote on X.
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.”
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.”
“I feel like the problems are surmountable,” he said. “But they’re still difficult.”
