I hated these sentences way before LLMs, at least in the context of an explanation.
> it's not just a website you go like Google, it's a little spirit/ghost that "lives" on your computer
This type of sentence, I call rhetorical fat. Get rid of this fat and you obtain a boring sentence that repeats what has been said in the previous one.
Not all rhetorical fats are equal, and I must admit I find myself eyerolling on the "little spirit" part more than about the fatness.
I understand the author wants to decorate things and emphasize key elements, and the hate I feel is only caused by the incompatible projection of my ideals to a text that doesn't belong to me.
> it's not just about the image generation itself, it's about the joint capability coming from text generation.
That's unjustified conceptual stress.
That could be a legitimate answer to a question ("No, no, it's not just about that, it's more about this"), but it's a text. Maybe the text wants you to be focused, maybe the text wants to hype you; this is the shape of the hype without the hype.
"I find image generation is cooler when paired with text generation."
It is not a decoration. Karpathy juxtaposes ChatGPT (which feels like a "better google" to most people) to Claude Code, which, apparently, feels different to him. It's a comparison between the two.
You might find this statement non-informative, but without two parts there's no comparison. That's really the semantics of the statement which Karpathy is trying to express.
ChatGPT-ish "it's not just" is annoying because the first part is usually a strawman, something reader considers trite. But it's not the case here.
Indeed, I was probably grumpy at the time I wrote the comment. I do find some truth in it still.
You're right ! The strawman theory is based.
But I think there's more to it, I find dislikable the structure of these sentences (which I find a bit sensationnalist for nothing, I don't know, maybe I am still grumpy).
Well, language is a subject to 'fashion' one-upmanship game: people want to demonstrate their sophistication, often by copying some "cool" patterns, but then over-used patterns become "uncool" cliche.
So it might be just a natural reaction to over-use of a particular pattern. This kind of stuff have been driving language evolution for millennia. Besides that, pompous style is often used in 'copy' (slogans and ads) which is something most people don't like.
Karpathy should go back to what he does best: educating people about AI on a deep level. Running experiments and sharing how they work, that sort of stuff. It seems lately he is closer to an influencer who reviews AI-based products. Hopefully it is not too late to go back.
I feel these review stuff is more like a side / pass time to him. Look at nanochat for example. My impression is that these are the thongs he spends most of his energy still.
After all,l he's been a "influencer" for a long time, starting from the "software 2.0" essay.