I love LLMs, I hate hype

AI researcher George Hotz, founder of comma.ai and creator of TinyGrad, criticizes hype around artificial intelligence while expressing enthusiasm for LLMs, self-driving cars, and coding agents. He argues that AI progress is driven by Moore's law and general computing advances, not by frontier labs, and that fears of AI taking over are overblown. Hotz also notes that AI coding tools are useful but require careful use and do not eliminate the need for programming skills.

I love LLMs, I hate hype I think from this blog you may misunderestimate how absolutely giddy I am about AI. I did hacking from 2007-2014, after that my whole https://comma.ai/ career https://tinygrad.org/ has been devoted to AI. I love the progress. I’m so excited for the new LLMs https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-6/ , self driving cars https://www.tesla.com/fsd , video generation models https://github.com/Wan-Video , and coding agents https://opencode.ai/ . I set up a Linux box with opencode on my local GLM-5.2 https://huggingface.co/zai-org/GLM-5.2 last week and wow like just saying install tmux with the geohot configuration works; the Year of the Linux Desktop is finally here What I don’t like is two things. One, this constant bullshit about some window closing, or the perpetual underclass, or falling hopelessly behind. This is negative valence hype, not only is it not true, it’s mostly designed to make you feel bad about yourself and move to shitty San Francisco where everything really does suck like how these people claim. And two, this strawman jump from, oh hey, it’s a fancy autocomplete, smart compiler, better search engine, to it’s gonna like own the whole light cone bro like if you aren’t in SF and at the right parties there’s gonna be like a flash of light in the sky one day and you’re not even gonna know what happened but everything just Changed. I’ll bet you everything I have that this doesn’t happen. The people perpetuating this are terrible people, but the justice is that this is how they feel inside all the time themselves . Here’s a cool presentation from 2016 https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm about superintelligence. Here’s a movie from 1991 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator 2: Judgment Day about machines taking over the world. A certain cult likes to claim credit for things that are happening with or without them, and this is my main argument against the valuation of frontier labs /blog/jekyll/update/2026/06/21/the-doom-justifies-the-valuation.html . It’s not that AI won’t create that much value, it’s that they won’t capture it /blog/jekyll/update/2025/02/19/nobody-will-profit.html . They try to dress it up with some high minded safety or China bullshit, but the core of the anti open source arguments is a fear of commodification. AI is something that’s happening mostly due to Moore’s law and general progress in computing, not something that they are doing. Of course they have a strong incentive against you finding this out, because then you might not want to give them billions of dollars. I might have been a little harsh in The Eternal Sloptember /blog/jekyll/update/2026/05/24/the-eternal-sloptember.html about models not being able to program. What’s really happening is that programming is changing. Can compilers program? Here’s a Linus Torvalds quote https://www.reddit.com/r/buildinpublic/comments/1ubja8e/linus torvalds people bragging about ai writing/ about how agents make programming 10x more productive, but compilers make programming 1000x more productive. I think 10x and 1000x are extreme estimates, but I’m now pretty confident I’m getting better at using them and get some boost from the models. It is a new skill, and it’s not like I haven’t constantly been trying them https://xcancel.com/alxfazio/status/1996207471988486432 . You have to be really careful, they can increase cognitive fatigue https://warpedvisions.org/blog/2025/hitting-the-wall-at-ai-speed/ , and all the vibe coded stuff is still slop where’s all this new magical software that the productivity improvements should imply? . But models are useful just like find replace, stack overflow, or all the regexes I never learned how to write and now never will AI is the continuation of the computer revolution. I love computers so much.