Andrej Karpathy’s essay “Software 2.0”
Neural networks as a new way to write software
Confirmed
The takeaway
On Nov 11, 2017 Andrej Karpathy, then Tesla’s director of AI, published “Software 2.0” on Medium.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
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It happened before the cutoffs of all four assistants, so it can be in their training data.
Key facts
- Published on Medium Nov 11, 2017; announced on X the same day (‘New blog post: “Software 2.0”’)
- Software 1.0 = explicit code written by humans; Software 2.0 = neural-network weights found by optimization against a dataset and goal
- Argues much of the software stack (vision, speech, translation, games) was already moving to 2.0, with data curation becoming the main programming activity
What happened
Karpathy’s essay described neural networks as a new programming paradigm, in which the programmer’s job becomes collecting, labeling and cleaning data and choosing an architecture and objective, while gradient descent searches program space.
Why it matters
It gave the deep-learning era its best-known software-engineering metaphor, and Karpathy’s later talks (‘Software 3.0’, where natural-language prompts program LLMs) and his 2025 ‘vibe coding’ post build directly on it.
Sources
2 sources from 2 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
2 sources: 2 primary
Primary
- Andrej Karpathy: Software 2.0 (Medium)karpathy.medium.com, official
- Andrej Karpathy on X announcing the postx.com, official
Changes
- Filed (primary source checked)