Karpathy’s point reframed: agents come after models, not before them
FinanceYF5 · x · 2026-07-21
This reply restates Karpathy’s point in a sharper, more direct way:
- Stop trying to make agents do everything before you understand the model underneath.
- Demos are easy, but turning them into products can take years; skipping fundamentals leads to collapse.
- An agent is not the product — the underlying model is.
- The closing line flips the credit back to builders: the people making agents now are the ones at the frontier, not OpenAI or DeepMind.
Related event: Karpathy Warns Against Rushing AI Agents Before Mastering Base Models(5 posts)→
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