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Training Data · 2 min · Apr 29, 2026

You can outsource thinking but not understanding

Andrej Karpathy argues that tools can do the thinking work, but users still need understanding to choose goals and direct agents. He describes personal understanding as a bottleneck, not an optional extra.

Andrej Karpathy

Andrej Karpathy is co-founder of OpenAI, former head of AI at Tesla, and founder of Eureka Labs.

Joined Anthropic's pretraining team; founded Eureka Labs, an AI-native school, after leading Tesla's Autopilot AI.

  • SZ

    Stephanie Zhan, Host · Partner, Sequoia

About this segment

Andrej Karpathy argues that tools can do the thinking work, but users still need understanding to choose goals and direct agents. He describes personal understanding as a bottleneck, not an optional extra.

From “Andrej Karpathy: From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering w/ Stephanie Zhan”, Apr 29, 2026. Watch the full episode

“you can outsource your thinking but you can't outsource your understanding”
Andrej Karpathyat 28:08 · Training Data28:08

Takeaways

  1. Understanding remains the bottleneck for directing agents.
  2. Learning helps people choose what to build and why.
  3. Knowledge bases can offer new ways to explore information.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 2:24Software 3.0 makes some apps unnecessary5:13
  2. 9:29Verifiability helps explain where AI excels4:11
  3. 19:22Engineers still need to own judgment and system design4:15
  4. 15:42Agentic engineering raises output without lowering the quality bar3:45
  5. 25:15Agent-first services should let agents handle setup and deployment2:21

  6. 27:40You can outsource thinking but not understanding2:04

Up next · Training DataCoding is solved for the code Boris writes3:42

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 27:43

    Okay, I think we have to end on a question about education because you are probably one of the very best in the world at making complex technical concepts simple and deeply thoughtful about how we design education around it. what still remains worth learning deeply when intelligence gets cheap as we move into the next era of AI yeah there was a tweet that blew my mind recently and I keep thinking about it like every other day it was something along the lines of you can outsource your thinking but you can't outsource your understanding and I think that's really nicely put I so yeah because I still I'm I'm still part of the system and I still have to, somehow information still has to make it into my brain and I feel like I'm becoming a bottleneck of just even knowing what are we trying to build,

  2. 28:30

    why is it worth doing, how do I direct my agents and so on. So I do still think that ultimately something has to direct the thinking and the processing and so on. And that's still kind of fundamentally constrained somehow by understanding. And this is one reason I also was very excited about all the LLM knowledge bases, because I feel like that's a way for me to process information and anytime I see a different projection onto information I always like feel like I gain insight. So it's really just a lot of prompts for me to do synthetic data generation kind of over some fixed data. So I really enjoy whenever I read an article I have my you know my wiki that's being built up from these articles and I love asking questions about things or and I think that ultimately these are tools to enhance understanding in

  3. 29:16

    a certain way and this is still kind of like a bit of a bottleneck because then you can't direct the you can be a good director if you still because the LLNs certainly don't excel at understanding you still are uniquely in charge of that so yeah I think tools to that effect I think are incredibly interesting exciting I'm excited to be back here in a couple years and to see if we've been fully automated out of the loop and they actually take care of understanding as well thank you so much for joining us Andre I really appreciate it