Karpathy Proposes New AI Benchmark: Turning Lord of the Rings Text into 3D Worlds

Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI, recently proposed a new AI benchmark: give a model the opening paragraph of 'The Lord of the Rings' and ask it to create an interactive 3D world. Previously, the industry often used generating SVG images of 'pelicans riding bikes' to test spatial reasoning and coding skills, but as models improve, simple tasks no longer tell them apart.\n\nKarpathy asked Claude Opus 5 to build a 3D scene using three.js, with the input being the first paragraph of 'The Lord of the Rings'. The test allowed up to 1 million tokens, costing about $10. Claude Opus 5 took about 2 hours and produced around 5,500 lines of code. The final output is a 3D animation showing Bilbo's farewell party and a cave full of treasure.\n\nAlthough it can't match hours of human work, the completion level is still impressive given the AI did it in just 2 hours. This test aims to evaluate a model's overall performance in code generation, scene design, and multimedia creation.