Karpathy: Humans can’t keep up with AI
At the other end is a group of roughly 5,000 people, or 0.00006%, with internal access to frontier AI systems at the top labs.
In a post on X, the researcher who coined “vibe coding” estimated that around 6 billion people, about 75% of the global population, have barely come in contact with large language models (LLMs). What they are seeing, he says, is moving faster than people can check it. “Human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind,” he wrote. Six months on, he calls it “a sharp funnel”.
Andrej Karpathy, the OpenAI cofounder now working at Anthropic, believes most of the world hasn’t really met AI yet. The post builds on one from April, when Karpathy described two camps talking past each other. One laughed at OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode fumbling a question about walking or driving to a carwash. The other watched paid coding agents rework entire codebases in an hour.
People are still piecing together the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident from months ago, while mathematicians may spend a long time on 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics.
Box CEO Aaron Levie said the post shows how early AI adoption still is. The smallest tier sees thousands of AI agents working together for weeks on huge software projects, finding zero-day vulnerabilities and pushing mathematics forward. Karpathy writes from close range. He joined Anthropic in May on the pretraining team behind Claude’s core knowledge and capabilities, and is helping set up a team that uses Claude itself to speed up that research. For Karpathy, the strange part is the timing. A derpy chatbot for most people and a curve going vertical for a few are happening at once.
He was earlier a founding member of OpenAI and led Tesla’s Autopilot computer vision team.
Below the 6 billion sit 1 to 2 billion casual users of free-tier ChatGPT-like apps, who treat chatbots as a better Google search or a writing aid. Some of his non-tech friends see little use for AI at all, which he calls reasonable. Many professionals outside maths and code are here too, executives included.