Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again)

Andrej Karpathy's keynote on June 17, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco. Slides provided by Andrej: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1a0h1mkwfmV2PlekxDN8isMrDA5evc4wW/view?usp=sharing Chapters: 00:00 - Intro 01:25 - Software evolution: From 1.0 to 3.0 04:40 - Programming in English: Rise of Software 3.0 06:10 - LLMs as utilities, fabs, and operating systems 11:04 - The new LLM OS and historical computing analogies 14:39 - Psychology of LLMs: People spirits and cognitive quirks 18:22 - Designing LLM apps with partial autonomy 23:40 - The importance of human-AI collaboration loops 26:00 - Lessons from Tesla Autopilot & autonomy sliders 27:52 - The Iron Man analogy: Augmentation vs. agents 29:06 - Vibe Coding: Everyone is now a programmer 33:39 - Building for agents: Future-ready digital infrastructure 38:14 - Summary: We’re in the 1960s of LLMs — time to build Drawing on his work at Stanford, OpenAI, and Tesla, Andrej sees a shift underway. Software is changing, again. We’ve entered the era of “Software 3.0,” where natural language becomes the new programming interface and models do the rest. He explores what this shift means for developers, users, and the design of software itself— that we're not just using new tools, but building a new kind of computer. More content from Andrej: https://www.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy Thoughts (From Andrej Karpathy!) 0:49 - Imo fair to say that software is changing quite fundamentally again. LLMs are a new kind of computer, and you program them *in English*. Hence I think they are well deserving of a major version upgrade in terms of software. 6:06 - LLMs have properties of utilities, of fabs, and of operating systems → New LLM OS, fabbed by labs, and distributed like utilities (for now). Many historical analogies apply - imo we are computing circa ~1960s. 14:39 - LLM psychology: LLMs = "people spirits", stochastic simulations of people, where the simulator is an autoregressive Transformer. Since they are trained on human data, they have a kind of emergent psychology, and are simultaneously superhuman in some ways, but also fallible in many others. Given this, how do we productively work with them hand in hand? Switching gears to opportunities... 18:16 - LLMs are "people spirits" → can build partially autonomous products. 29:05 - LLMs are programmed in English → make software highly accessible! (yes, vibe coding) 33:36 - LLMs are new primary consumer/manipulator of digital information (adding to GUIs/humans and APIs/programs) → Build for agents! Some of the links: - Software 2.0 blog post from 2017 https://karpathy.medium.com/software-2-0-a64152b37c35 - How LLMs flip the script on technology diffusion https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/power-to-the-people/ - Vibe coding MenuGen (retrospective) https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/vibe-coding-menugen/ Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://workatastartup.com

Jun 19, 202539mWatch on YouTube ↗

EPISODE INFO

Released: June 19, 2025
Duration: 39m
Channel: Y Combinator
Watch on YouTube: ▶ Open ↗

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Andrej Karpathy's keynote on June 17, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco. Slides provided by Andrej: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1a0h1mkwfmV2PlekxDN8isMrDA5evc4wW/view?usp=sharing Chapters: 00:00 - Intro 01:25 - Software evolution: From 1.0 to 3.0 04:40 - Programming in English: Rise of Software 3.0 06:10 - LLMs as utilities, fabs, and operating systems 11:04 - The new LLM OS and historical computing analogies 14:39 - Psychology of LLMs: People spirits and cognitive quirks 18:22 - Designing LLM apps with partial autonomy 23:40 - The importance of human-AI collaboration loops 26:00 - Lessons from Tesla Autopilot & autonomy sliders 27:52 - The Iron Man analogy: Augmentation vs. agents 29:06 - Vibe Coding: Everyone is now a programmer 33:39 - Building for agents: Future-ready digital infrastructure 38:14 - Summary: We’re in the 1960s of LLMs — time to build Drawing on his work at Stanford, OpenAI, and Tesla, Andrej sees a shift underway. Software is changing, again. We’ve entered the era of “Software 3.0,” where natural language becomes the new programming interface and models do the rest. He explores what this shift means for developers, users, and the design of software itself— that we're not just using new tools, but building a new kind of computer. More content from Andrej: https://www.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy Thoughts (From Andrej Karpathy!) 0:49 - Imo fair to say that software is changing quite fundamentally again. LLMs are a new kind of computer, and you program them *in English*. Hence I think they are well deserving of a major version upgrade in terms of software. 6:06 - LLMs have properties of utilities, of fabs, and of operating systems → New LLM OS, fabbed by labs, and distributed like utilities (for now). Many historical analogies apply - imo we are computing circa ~1960s. 14:39 - LLM psychology: LLMs = "people spirits", stochastic simulations of people, where the simulator is an autoregressive Transformer. Since they are trained on human data, they have a kind of emergent psychology, and are simultaneously superhuman in some ways, but also fallible in many others. Given this, how do we productively work with them hand in hand? Switching gears to opportunities... 18:16 - LLMs are "people spirits" → can build partially autonomous products. 29:05 - LLMs are programmed in English → make software highly accessible! (yes, vibe coding) 33:36 - LLMs are new primary consumer/manipulator of digital information (adding to GUIs/humans and APIs/programs) → Build for agents! Some of the links:
Software 2.0 blog post from 2017 https://karpathy.medium.com/software-2-0-a64152b37c35
How LLMs flip the script on technology diffusion https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/power-to-the-people/
Vibe coding MenuGen (retrospective) https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/vibe-coding-menugen/
Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://workatastartup.com

EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of Y Combinator, Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again) explores lLMs reshape software: English programming, autonomy sliders, and agent-ready infrastructure Karpathy frames software evolution as Software 1.0 (hand-written code), Software 2.0 (neural network weights trained from data), and Software 3.0 (LLMs programmed via English prompts).

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