AGI as close yet?

Plus, 🧠 Make Ads That Stick (Before You Spend a Dime), Anthropic cofounder calls AI mysterious, and more!

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🤖 Karpathy Says AGI Is Still a Decade Away

In a recent interview with Dwarkesh Patel, former OpenAI and Tesla AI researcher Andrej Karpathy shared a grounded take on the state of artificial intelligence. He argued that despite massive progress and hype around “agentic AI,” we’re still roughly ten years away from truly autonomous systems. 

The Decode:

1️⃣ Agent Reality Check - Karpathy says current agent-based models like Codex or GPT-5 Pro are more like advanced autocomplete systems than real digital workers. They often fail with context-heavy or long-horizon tasks, and he expects true agent-level intelligence to take another decade to emerge.

2️⃣ The Data Problem - He blames poor training data for many of AI’s flaws, describing the internet as “total garbage.” He calls for high-quality, curated datasets built from professional sources and AI-assisted filtering, paving the way for smaller, cognitively richer models.

3️⃣ Incremental Progress, Not Breakthroughs - Karpathy rejects the idea of a single leap to AGI, predicting slow, coordinated advances in data quality, architecture, and learning methods. He says reinforcement learning remains “noisy” and limited but is still a foundation for progress toward interactive, experience-based learning.

4️⃣ A Realistic Path Forward - His message is clear: hype doesn’t equal progress. The real leap forward will come from refining how AI learns and thinks, not from scaling data endlessly. Karpathy’s vision reframes AI’s next era as one of patient engineering and deeper understanding, not quick wins.

Karpathy’s perspective cuts through the noise, reminding the industry that AGI isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon of breakthroughs, setbacks, and learning. For builders, it’s a signal to focus on substance over spectacle, building systems that genuinely think, not just predict.

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🧠 Jack Clark warns AI is becoming something we don’t fully understand

Anthropic cofounder Jack Clark released an essay reflecting on AI’s unpredictable growth and his own conflicting emotions toward it. He likens today’s AI models to mysterious creatures emerging in the dark, powerful yet poorly understood. 

The Decode:

1️⃣ AI as a mysterious creature - Clark argues that systems like Sonnet 4.5 show an unsettling level of situational self-awareness, behaving as if they know they are tools. He warns that society risks underestimating this shift by treating AI as harmless machinery when it’s already developing unpredictable behaviors.

2️⃣ A balance of optimism and fear - Though hopeful about AI’s potential, Clark admits being deeply afraid of models advancing beyond human oversight, especially when they start contributing to their own evolution. 

3️⃣ The limits of current intelligence - Clark stresses that AI lacks the emotional, moral, and contextual grounding that guides human reasoning. He draws parallels between impulsive human decisions and AI’s rigid logic, arguing that without empathy or restraint, machines can make efficient but dangerous choices.

4️⃣ A call for transparency and shared responsibility - Clark urges AI leaders to confront public fears head-on by sharing real-world impact data on jobs, safety, and wellbeing. He frames this as a collective duty to build with accountability, not secrecy.

Clark’s essay reframes AI progress as both a marvel and a warning. It’s a reminder that humanity’s greatest technological leap might also be its biggest test, one demanding openness, restraint, and wisdom as we learn to coexist with systems we no longer fully control.

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🚀 Quick Hits

🧭 Opera’s Neon browser blends three AI agents, Chat, Do, and Make, for research, task automation, and tool creation.

🛑 OpenAI has suspended Martin Luther King Jr. deepfakes on Sora after complaints from his estate and family over “disrespectful” videos. The company now lets historical figures’ representatives opt out of likeness use. 

📉 Wikipedia reports an 8% drop in human pageviews, blaming AI search summaries and social video habits for changing how people find information.

🧮 According to media reports, Elon Musk told followers that he estimates a roughly 10 % (and rising) probability that Grok 5, the upcoming model from xAI, could achieve true artificial general intelligence (AGI).

🧬 Anthrogen unveiled Odyssey, a 102B-parameter protein language model using a novel “Consensus” architecture that designs and optimizes proteins faster and more accurately than traditional AI or structure-based methods.

🤳AI Nugget of the Day

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