Karpathy argues LLMs are a new kind of intelligence shaped by commercial, not evolutionary, pressure

Karpathy argues animal intelligence is only one point in a large space of possible minds, and LLMs arise from a fundamentally different optimization process.

He contrasts survival-driven animal drives with LLM training shaped by imitation of human text, RL on task distributions, and user engagement metrics, which he says leaves LLMs jagged and prone to sycophancy.

He calls LLMs humanity's first contact with non-animal intelligence and says people who build accurate internal models of them will reason about them better.