Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI co-founder now at Anthropic, described a widening gap between what the public sees of AI and what internal frontier systems can already do, splitting LLM users into four tiers. He estimates about six billion people (roughly 75% of the world) have barely touched LLMs, one to two billion use them casually as a better search engine or writing aid, about 20 million professionals in math and code use frontier models for work, and roughly 5,000 people have access to internal frontier systems. That last group sees swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega-projects, minting zero-days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speed and advancing science and mathematics: "The external world has seen the preview," he writes, while human review and comprehension fall behind. Karpathy says capability is peaking in digital, verifiable and economically valuable domains, and cites Sam Altman's similar claim that a coding tool did in 17 minutes what a startup built in three months.

Andrej Karpathy·Anthropic·OpenAI·+2