Andrej Karpathy: Elon Uses His Hammer to Smash Bottlenecks—People Don’t Realize How Hard

Andrej Karpathy: People underestimate how much Elon uses his hammer to remove bottlenecks.

“If Elon asks the engineers, what's blocking you and he hears twice that they don't have enough GPUs to run their thing, he's going to be like, okay, this is a problem.

When you don't have satisfying answers, he says, I want to talk to the person in charge of the GPU cluster. Someone dials the phone and he's just like: Okay, double the cluster right now. Let's have a meeting tomorrow and from now on, send me daily updates until the cluster is twice the size.

If they push back and say, we have this procurement set up, we have this timeline, and NVIDIA says that we don't have enough GPUs, and it will take six months to get more, then you get a rise of an eyebrow and Elon's like, okay, I want to talk to [NVIDIA'S CEO] Jensen.

He just removes bottlenecks. I think the extent to which he's extremely involved and removes bottlenecks and applies his hammer is not appreciated.”

Sequoia Capital, March 20, 2024