Karpathy’s 2025 retrospective is the clearest articulation I’ve seen of what foundational AI labs are actually building. We’re not “evolving animals,” we’re “summoning ghosts.” LLMs have completely different optimization pressures than biological intelligence. Humans evolved for tribal survival. LLMs optimize for imitating text, solving puzzles, and winning upvotes on LM Arena. Different pressures, different shapes in the intelligence space. This framing finally explains what confuses…