I had a very different personal experience, but Karpathy did a wonderful PhD and I did a very marginal one (at a good school, which in many ways makes it worse). From the perspective of the "anchor" rather than the valedictorian, I'd say that he's right on almost all points as to what you should look to do if you decide to be a PhD. However, I do take exception at the rather false dichotomy between industry and academia that he creates.<p>A <i>good</i> PhD leads to many of the nice things he describes: freedom and ownership and personal growth and all that stuff. An average PhD (or worse) leads to pretty much the opposite. Most of the superstars I know went on to do pretty much whatever they are interested in at top schools. The non-superstars (and the real lumps, like me) can easily wind up in a death spiral - where your mediocre publishing record and mediocre PhD afford entry only into 3rd-tier institutions, where you will work with worse and worse people, more or less guaranteeing steadily declining quality of work. A mediocre result more or less guarantees that you will be a low-status drone in academia, trying to wedge world-class work in with a bunch of other activities (teaching, being a glorified research assistant, and other 'service').<p>No-one sets out to do a bad PhD, but people need to understand that the average outcome isn't nearly as glowing as Karpathy outlines. Similarly, the outcome of going to industry also has a huge range. I found myself immediately - I mean on Day 1 - doing more pure Computer Science going to work for a startup than I had any reasonable hope of doing as a semi-failed academic, and have had a steadily improving experience subsequently (some of this stems from a rather delayed growing-up on my part, so it's not entirely a judgement on industry vs academia).