Observed Signal · Oct 22, 2025 · Commentary · Source: Trending Topics · Impact: 2/5 · Sentiment: Negative
OpenAI Co-Founder Karpathy: 'AI Agents Simply Don't Work'
OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy has publicly criticized the current state of AI agents, saying they "simply don't work." In an appearance on the Dwarkesh Podcast, he argued that today's agents lack sufficient intelligence, multimodal capability, and the ability to use computers properly. He also noted that they cannot learn continuously and predicted it will take roughly a decade to solve these problems. Karpathy, who is developing an AI-native school at Eureka Labs and previously served as AI chief at Tesla, advocates for human-AI collaboration rather than fully autonomous agents. Separately, ScaleAI growth lead Quintin Au highlighted compounding error rates, estimating that each AI action has about a 20% failure probability, leaving only a 32% chance that a five-step agent task is completed correctly. Karpathy remains broadly optimistic about AI's long-term trajectory, but far more pessimistic than typical industry hype.
A leading AI figure's critique of current AI agent reliability may temper near-term enterprise and AdTech adoption of autonomous agents, but it is an opinion rather than a platform change or market event.
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Key Takeaways & Evidence Grounding
- Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI, said current AI agents "simply don't work" and lack intelligence, multimodality, and computer-use capability.
- Karpathy predicted it will take about a decade to solve current AI agent problems.
- Karpathy is developing an AI-native school at Eureka Labs and previously served as AI chief at Tesla.
- Karpathy is an investor in the Austrian AI startup Magic, founded by Eric Steinberger and Sebastian De Ro.
- Quintin Au of ScaleAI estimated a 20% per-action error rate for AI agents, meaning a five-step task succeeds only about 32% of the time.
Connected Companies & Entities
4 Entities mapped“So ist er nicht nur Gründungsmitglied von OpenAI und hat an GPT-4 mitgearbeitet....”
“fungiert auch als Investor etwa beim Österreich-stämmigen KI-Startup Magic von Eric Steinberger und Sebastian De Ro...”
“sondern war er auch AI-Chef bei Tesla...”
Ontology Mapping & Concepts
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