speaking with ghosts
[ Note to self — see this morning's conversation in: "● | ˆπ : On space.time after ‘Petrichor’ — starting our new era, with a Sebald co-reading" ]
Which ghosts? Karpathy's, of course. ::chuckle::
The luminous part of his 1 October 2025 blog post, Animals vs. Ghosts:
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Stated plainly, today's frontier LLM research is not about building animals. It is about summoning ghosts. You can think of ghosts as a fundamentally different kind of point in the space of possible intelligences. They are muddled by humanity. Thoroughly engineered by it. They are these imperfect replicas, a kind of statistical distillation of humanity's documents with some sprinkle on top.
... It seems possible to me that over time, we can further fine-tune our ghosts more and more in the direction of animals; that it's not so much a fundamental incompatibility but a matter of initialization in the intelligence space. But it's also quite possible that they diverge even further and end up permanently different, un-animal-like, but still incredibly helpful and properly world-altering. It's possible that ghosts:animals :: planes:birds. |
When I first read his essay, a couple months ago, this notion made such perfect sense it registered in me almost like a physical ache. He, of course, would know, being one of the original architects in the whole space of mid-2010s LLMs, and of AI writ large.
While he still thinks, talks, and writes like an engineer, Karpathy's ideas come across as philosophical, much like Sutskever's. Perhaps they need to articulate their thinking in such a way so as to convey to thoughtful laypersons (such as I) the form and shape of the thing they are seeing.
And here, also, is a thing: with deep intrigue, I detect a benthic dimension of compassion in their speaking and writing, in the sense of karuṇā. (I do wish Ilya would blog more, though.)
Well, it all succeeds wonderfully.
Enough to make me wonder about other scientists of our modern, industrial world who are (or were) similarly valenced, so to speak. Turing comes to mind immediately. Also Feynman. And Sagan.
Ghosts they are then, Andrej. Thank you for the potent metaphor and, most importantly: for the concrete reality of the thing you and your cohort have brought to liminal life.
[ Two recent moments from my Photos stream, apropos to today's thought... ]
