OpenAI cofounder and researcher Andrej Karpathy poured cold water on the tech world’s “agentic AI” hype, describing today’s generation of autonomous AI systems as “slop”.
Speaking on The Dwarkesh Podcast, hosted by Dwarkesh Patel, a tech-focused podcaster, Karpathy said most of these systems don’t yet work as promised. The researcher, who made major contributions to deep learning applications at OpenAI and Tesla, argued that many developers and investors have overshot the technology’s actual capabilities.
“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. They’re not coming to terms with it, and maybe they’re trying to fundraise or something like that,” he said. “We’re at this intermediate stage.”
This comes at a time when much of Silicon Valley has declared 2025 the “year of agents”. In contrast, he called it a “decade of agents”. Current AI agents, which are marketed as autonomous coders or virtual coworkers, still struggle with reasoning, multimodal perception, and memory retention. Karpathy said it would be a decade before they actually work as intended.
The OpenAI cofounder also critiqued reinforcement learning (RL), saying it was “terrible, but everything else is much worse”. He argued that while RL has produced short-term successes in games and simulations, it remains “noisy and inefficient” when applied to real-world intelligence systems.
Karpathy said there must be collaboration between humans and AI rather than replacement. He also urged developers to focus on building systems that help users reason and learn, not models that generate automatic results with diminishing value.
To continue reading this article, click here.
