Karpathy: LLMs Lack Cultural Accumulation and Self-Play
i_dg23 · x · 2026-08-01
Andrej Karpathy highlighted that current Large Language Models (LLMs) are missing two critical elements that propelled human intelligence: cultural accumulation and self-play.
- Cultural Accumulation: He questioned why an LLM can't write a book for other LLMs to read, be inspired by, or be shocked by.
- Self-play: Noting AlphaGo's success with self-play, he asked why an LLM can't generate increasingly difficult problems for another LLM to solve and learn from.
Researcher Noah added that self-play works well in chess, Go, and poker because they are two-player zero-sum games, which simplifies the problem. The real world is much messier, which is why we haven't seen many self-play successes in LLMs yet.
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