Andrej Karpathy · Independent · 2025-12-19
Karpathy's annual stocktake is the closest thing the field has to a canonical year-end map. He names six paradigm shifts — RLVR, the app layer, on-device agents, vibe coding, multimodal GUIs, and the "ghosts vs animals" reframing of what LLMs actually are — and threads them into one argument about where 2025 actually moved.
It is opinionated, occasionally wrong, and unusually generous about what is still missing. For a learner, it is the cheapest way to get a working model of the year that the rest of the curriculum will quietly assume you already have. Read it before reading anyone else's recap — they are mostly responding to this.
> LLMs are the next major computing paradigm similar to computers of the 1970s, 80s, etc.