The Inktelligence - June 23, 2005

In a recent YC AI Startup School session, Andrej Karpathy explores how we’ve moved into “Software 3.0”. The entire talk is about 39 minutes long so go grab a cup of coffee before you settle down to listen to it.

Anyway, here are a few of my takeaways:

• We’re in Software 3.0, Prompts Are Code
  
  Software 1.0 (hand-written code) → Software 2.0 (neural network weights) → Software 3.0 (prompts)
  
  Your prompts are the new source code so write clear instructions in plain English. The better you define inputs, the more reliable the output.
  

• LLMs are like mainframes: Terminal-Only OS
  
  These models sit in the cloud like 1960s mainframes: centralized compute engines you access over a text “terminal,” with no unified GUI yet. You talk directly to them via prompts (just as early computers required command-line interaction) and they manage memory, scheduling, and I/O under the hood. What will the “GUI” for LLMs look like?
  

• Iron Man Suit: Augment, Don’t Abandon
  
  Treat AI like Tony Stark’s armor, an exoskeleton that amplifies your strengths while you stay firmly in the pilot’s seat. As Karpathy puts it: