Why the boundary problem is the biggest challenge in agentic AI

Andrej Karpathy, who led the computer vision team behind Tesla's self-driving brain (and many other AI things) has recently demonstrated a proof of concept for a very simple self-learning agent called auto-research. He claims this is the future of agentic AI, which is at least a decade away from delivering real value. This lands in stark contrast to the popular narrative that trillions of agents running on trillions of dollars of AI infrastructure are just around the corner. Karpathy frames this conventional narrative as scaling agentic slop.

I have a felt sense he is right despite the trillions of dollars betting against his thesis. I'll unpack in more detail why the bet on the conventional agentic AI narrative may mostly prove to be an expensive and unhelpful lesson in the long run. But suffice it to say that today's agentic AI mania has eerie parallels to the ...