Those projects are a complete joke. Neither of them were even original, people have been playing around with those ideas for well over a year.

They just became "famous" because Karpathy is effectively an AI celebrity, so he could throw shit at a wall and post it on X and it would get 10k Github stars.

But seriously, people have been using the models to tweak hyperparemeters, or using LLMs to help create a second brain using markdown or json files or 100X other combinations of files, for a long time already.

No, these are developed off of the assumed uses of the models (predictive autofiller) rather than their actual, cognitive and potential industrial use (developing large scale frameworks for industrial production, automating systems that normally require human monitoring), and uses that we have not yet discovered, because we have not figured out all the constraints and limitations of these models. If Karpathy was in the game like he used to be, he would be on real product. Right now he’s probably so lost by the very thing he helped create that he is stuck doing these mini projects for his own personal interest, without anyone really critically engaging with his work.

Just because something is not ground breaking that doesn't mean that technology path isn't valuable.