penAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy has said that artificial intelligence technology is “far from perfect,” and that it is not yet the “year of agents.” Karpathy, who is one of the leading founders in the field, has also said that while he uses AI agent tools like Claude and Codex, they’re still way behind the work of humans.
“They’re cognitively lacking and it’s just not working. It will take about a decade to work through all of those issues,” Karpathy said, in an episode of the “Dwarkesh Podcast.”
“They just don’t work. They don’t have enough intelligence, they’re not multimodal enough, they can’t do computer use and all this stuff,” he added. “They don’t have continual learning. You can’t just tell them something and they’ll remember it.”
Karpathy’s remarks come at a time of rising concerns about AI replacing workers, and of mass layoffs, with AI being seen as the culprit. Recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that he is “confident” that AI will first replace customer service jobs as it changes the job market.
“Someone told me recently that the historical average is about 50 per cent of jobs significantly change… every 75 years, on average. My controversial take would be that this is going to be like a punctuated equilibria moment where a lot of that will happen in a short period of time,” he said. A recent OpenAI study also revealed that around 44 jobs were highly likely to be replaced by AI.
Karpathy believes that AI tools have not been perfected just yet to perform without a person there guiding it. “You should think of it almost like an employee or an intern that you would hire to work with you,” he said. “I want it to make fewer assumptions and ask/collaborate with me when not sure about something. I want to learn along the way and become better as a programmer, not just get served.”
Nowadays, AI agents are being implemented for customer service, IT and administrative tasks, but many tech companies are actually scaling back their automation plans. A recent report by MIT’s NANDA initiative, titled “The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025,” published on Fortune, reveals just how stark the odds are: despite the explosion of platforms and research, only about 5% of generative AI pilots succeed. The vast majority stall, producing little to no measurable impact on business results.
According to a report by Gartner, 50% of organizations who expected to significantly reduce their customer service workforce by 2027, are now abandoning these plans. Nevertheless, this hasn’t stopped companies from implementing AI. For example, McKinsey built an AI agent using Microsoft’s Copilot Studio software that can monitor an email address for incoming project proposals from potential clients.
Source – https://americanbazaaronline.com/2025/10/22/openai-cofounder-ai-agents-still-behind-humans-469040/