AI researcher Andrej Karpathy said large language models are moving beyond basic content generation after Anthropic’s Claude Opus created a procedural 3D world inspired by The Lord of the Rings using thousands of lines of code. On Saturday, Karpathy shared on X that AI systems are entering a phase where they can take on more complex creative tasks than traditional prompt-based experiments. He said he tested Claude Opus by providing the model with the opening paragraph of The Lord of the Rings, a large token budget and a request to create a Three.js rendering of the story. According to Karpathy, the model worked for about two hours and produced roughly 5,500 lines of code to procedurally generate the experience. "It’s kind of janky but fun," he said, adding that the model had to "place and orchestrate various polygon assets in (x,y,z) coordinates and write code that animates it all." Karpathy said the experiment demonstrated how AI could create highly customized digital environments that would previously have required significant human time and resources. Earlier, AI coding tools have rapidly shifted from productivity assistants to major drivers of software development, with OpenAI President Greg Brockman saying they went from writing about 20% of code to 80% within a month. Airbnb said AI generated 60% of its new code in the first quarter, allowing one engineer to handle work that previously required a team of 20. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said