Yaroslav Azhnyuk, founder of PetCube and miltech startups The Fourth Law and Odd Systems, recalled how he met Slovak co-founder of OpenAI, Andrey Karpaty. Azhnyuk said what impressed him most about Karpaty’s statement about AGI.
Yaroslav Azhnyuk, founder of PetCube and miltech startups The Fourth Law and Odd Systems, recalled how he met Slovak co-founder of OpenAI, Andrey Karpaty. Azhnyuk said what impressed him most about Karpaty’s statement about AGI.
Yaroslav Azhnyuk spoke about this in a podcast on the YouTube channel «UT-2». The entrepreneur said that they were introduced in San Francisco by Mishko Dzamba, a friend and bandmate of Karpaty. PetCube acquired Dzamba’s company PetBot, and he worked for some time in the Ukrainian startup as a chief engineer.
«An excellent engineer absolutely… [His] company did something similar to PetCube. But the uniqueness of this company was that one person there did what about 10 people did for us for two years. But Mishko did it himself in the evenings and on weekends,» Yaroslav Azhnyuk recalled.
He added that Mishko worked at PetCube for about four years and became one of Yaroslav’s best friends in Silicon Valley. Dzamba introduced Azhnyuk and Karpaty, who came to the PetCube office to play table tennis.
«And Karpaty and I and my Boring Company flamethrower roasted almonds in the parking lot near PetCube, we put them in some kind of tin box,» said Yaroslav Azhnyuk.
First 1000 Boring Company Flamethrowers being picked up today! pic.twitter.com/hBMp5fGzAB
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 9, 2018
Elon Musk’s Boring Company sold about 20,000 «non-flamethrowers» in 2018 as a humorous survival tool during a zombie apocalypse.
Andrey Karpaty is a Slovak-Canadian scientist specializing in deep learning and computer vision. He served as Director of Artificial Intelligence and Autopilot Vision at Tesla and is a co-founder and former employee of OpenAI.
In February 2025, Karpaty described a new programming technique called «vibecoding,» which involves using AI chatbots. The term has become popular among IT professionals and was even named the word of the year by the British Collins dictionary.
«Andrei has a phenomenal ability to explain complex things in a cool way,» notes Azhnyuk.
In late October, Andrey Karpaty said in an interview that full-fledged AI agents or something similar to AGI (artificial general intelligence) will not work correctly for at least 10 years. These words provoked lively discussions in the AI industry.
«A very interesting video came out with him, where he shook the foundation of the modern narrative of AI optimists. And he said that, well, you’re all pushing yourself a little, and general artificial intelligence is possible, but definitely not in a year or two, but maybe in 10 years, and we need to make a number of other major breakthroughs on the way to it,» said the founder of PetCube.
In his opinion, Karpaty skeptically commented on some of the theses of «outstanding people» in the field of AI.
«Finally, someone is adequately calling a spade a spade. Well, like, everyone sees that there are cool improvements in how ChatGPT works with information. Cool processing method, visual models are developing well. Well, this whole transformer architecture, we see how it will improve with those who give it more data, more computers,» Azhnyuk explained what he liked most in the interview with Karpaty.
According to the Ukrainian entrepreneur, «everyone who is in the know» understands that simply scaling what exists will not achieve general artificial intelligence.
«You will get more of what you have. This is a better data processor, a data generator,» noted Yaroslav Azhnyuk.
