Building a Book That Didn’t Exist
Andrej Karpathy had a question: What would the Founding Fathers think about America today? He couldn’t find a book that explored it, so he built one himself using OpenAI’s newest model, O1 Pro.
Here’s what he did:
- He prompted O1 Pro to generate a full book outline — chapters, themes, and structure.
- He worked through the outline, prompting for detailed content chapter by chapter.
- He had the model summarize everything into a cohesive conclusion.
To take it further, he used other tools to turn the text into a narrated YouTube video with images. The result? A full book—and an hour and 21 minutes of content—created from scratch. Here it is:
What I found most interesting wasn’t just the result but the process. With tools like this, you can learn about almost anything by shaping the content yourself. You decide what questions to ask, what structure you want, and how deep to go.
It’s more than just “getting answers.” The act of assembling prompts and refining the outputs forces you to clarify exactly what you’re trying to learn. It’s a kind of meta-learning: you’re learning about the topic and improving how you think about it at the same time.
Of course, there are trade-offs. Some of the content might be shallow or outright wrong. Karpathy called it a “naive first attempt” — and that’s the right way to think about it. If you wanted something more polished, you could refine the prompts, pull in additional sources, or cross-check the outputs.
Even so, there’s a lot of value here, especially for self-guided learning. Instead of waiting for the “perfect” book, you can create the resource you need, adapt it to your preferred medium — whether that’s reading, listening, or interacting — and iterate from there.
And it doesn’t have to stop with the final output. I didn’t listen to the full video (it’s a lot), but Karpathy shared the transcript. I can take that text, paste it into a large language model, and ask:
- What are the most surprising takeaways?
- What might historians push back on?
In a few seconds, I get a condensed version tailored to the questions I’m curious about.
What’s truly astounding is how much you can now do with these tools. You can slice, dice, combine, and remix enormous amounts of text, audio, and video data however you want. You can create your own content, build answers to niche questions, or explore topics no one has written about yet. It’s all at your fingertips — ready to be explored in whatever way suits you best.
All it really takes is curiosity and some time.
We’ve never been able to learn the way we can learn now. A few years ago, I wouldn’t have imagined this was possible — having tools that let you assemble knowledge, test ideas, and interact with the results so seamlessly. Yes, there are caveats. The content isn’t perfect, and it still requires judgment. But it’s hard to overstate just how incredible this is.
If you’re curious about something, there’s nothing stopping you from diving in. You don’t have to wait for the right book, video, or course. You can build it yourself.