Karpathy’s Pelican
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
Karpathy gave Opus 5 a $10, 1M-token budget to procedurally render LotR in JS.
Andrej Karpathy tested Opus 5 by feeding it the first paragraph of The Lord of the Rings, a 1M token budget (~$10), and asking for a three.js render. The model spent ~2 hours writing 5,500 lines of code that procedurally rendered the story in 3D. The result is janky but demonstrates how LLMs can create hyper-custom worlds no human would bother building. Karpathy notes LLMs still lack the ability to efficiently audit visual output, requiring slow screenshot-based checking.
He envisions on-demand ephemeral worlds ("GTA of X") where players join as spectators or characters.
What commenters are saying
Comments diverge into two camps. One group discusses hyper-personalized entertainment: some argue it will be niche or gimmicky, citing the social value of shared experiences; others see it as the next step for media, with fans creating custom content. A second camp debates the limits of AI creativity, noting that current image generation lacks spatial awareness and produces homogenous output, making human creators still necessary for differentiation.
A nostalgic subthread revives Google Wave, arguing its failure was organizational, not technical, and that no modern tool matches its collaborative features.