Andrej Karpathy argues LLMs are a fundamentally different category of intelligence because they learn from data rather than DNA-encoded pre-programming

A large portion of animal intelligence doesn't require any learning, claims @karpathy: it's baked into DNA. AI models, by contrast, start from random weights. They have to learn their intelligence, mostly by imitating the internet. This is so different that Andrej thinks it's a fundamentally different kind of intelligence: LLMs are more like ghosts than animals.