Andrej Karpathy: “More accurately described as the decade of agents … very early agents that are extremely impressive and that I use daily … they just don’t work … It will take about a decade to work through all of those issues”

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“The quote you’ve just mentioned, “It’s the decade of agents,” is actually a reaction to a pre-existing quote. 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. We have some very early agents that are extremely impressive and that I use daily—Claude and Codex and so on—but I still feel there’s so much work to be done. My reaction is we’ll be working with these things for a decade. They’re going to get better, and it’s going to be wonderful. I was just reacting to the timelines of the implication. […] Actually making it work. When you’re talking about an agent, or what the labs have in mind and maybe what I have in mind as well, you should think of it almost like an employee or an intern that you would hire to work with you. For example, you work with some employees here. When would you prefer to have an agent like Claude or Codex do that work? 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. They don’t do a lot of the things you’ve alluded to earlier. 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.”

— Andrej Karpathy, Dwarkesh Podcast, 17.10.2025 ↗