Rerunning Karpathy's Lord of the Rings world-building with no token cap

Layton Gott @Layton_GottOriginally posted 2026.09.26

Open original on X

I just reran Karpathy’s Lord of the Rings experiment with Opus 5.5... Karpathy capped Opus 5 at 1M tokens, around $10. this time I gave Opus 5.5 no token cap at all. same basic setup: > first paragraph of LOTR > let it build the world > let it run for hours and it absolutely destroyed Opus 5. the result looks WAY better. it also burned through $252 worth of tokens lol.

This post quotes another post: x.com/karpathy/status/2083749667410727319