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Andrej Karpathy, a widely respected research scientist and co-founder of OpenAI, has revised his timelines for unlocking artificial general intelligence (AGI) even as investors and other stakeholders worry that the AI boom is turning into a bubble.
The former Tesla executive has said that it will take at least another ten years for any AI company to achieve AGI, a hypothetical level of intelligence that would enable an AI system to perform complex tasks at the same level or better than humans. One of the reasons for the decade-long wait is that no company or research lab has been able to develop an AI system that learns continuously.
“They don’t have continual learning. You can’t just tell them something and they’ll remember it. They’re cognitively lacking and it’s just not working. It will take about a decade to work through all of those issues,” Karpathy said in a recent appearance on a podcast hosted by Dwarkesh Patel.
The Eureka Labs founder also revealed that he himself had fallen for the hype around generative AI, specifically on how 2025 was going to be the year of AI agents. “ I’m not actually sure who said this but they were alluding to this being the year of agents with respect to LLMs and how they were going to evolve. I was triggered by that because there’s some over-prediction going on in the industry. In my mind, this is more accurately described as the decade of agents,” he said.
While acknowledging that present-day AI agents such as Claude and Codex were “extremely impressive”, Karpathy said that there was still a lot of work to be done.
For example, you work with some employees here. When would you prefer to have an agent like Claude or Codex do that work?” he asked. “Currently, of course they can’t. What would it take for them to be able to do that? Why don’t you do it today? The reason you don’t do it today is because they just don’t work. They don’t have enough intelligence, they’re not multimodal enough, they can’t do computer use and all this stuff,” Karpathy added.
However, the AI/ML expert insisted that his timelines for AGI were actually bullish. “I think that overall, 10 years should otherwise be a very bullish timeline for AGI, it’s only in contrast to present hype that it doesn’t feel that way,” Karpathy said in a follow-up post on X.
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Who is Andrej Karpathy?
Though Karpathy has worked at prominent tech firms such as Tesla and OpenAI, his roots lie in teaching. Until 2015, he taught deep learning for computer vision at Stanford University in the US. Later, he became a founding member of OpenAI but left the non-profit after two years to head up Tesla’s AI department. During his tenure with the autonomous car manufacturer, Karpathy led the team building computer vision for Tesla Autopilot.
In 2022, he returned to OpenAI and worked on developing ChatGPT successor GPT-4 but his second stint ended in February this year. The 37-year-old has launched an online lecture series that teaches students how to build neural networks from scratch.
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