Karpathy retired the pelican-on-a-bicycle era.

Five weeks into his Anthropic pre-training role, Karpathy handed Claude Opus the opening paragraph of The Lord of the Rings, a large token budget, and a request to render it in Three.js. Two hours of work, roughly 5,500 lines of code procedurally positioning and animating polygon assets in 3D. His framing is the signal: "We're starting to leave the territory where you'd test an LLM by e.g. 'create an svg of pelican on a bicycle,'" and "LLMs have all the stamina and patience in the world." Eval design has to shift to multi-hour self-directed builds where the bottleneck is coherence, not capability.