OpenAI co-founder warns of deepening gap between casual chatbot users and AI professionals
- Published On Oct 12, 2026 at 01:13 PM IST
OpenAI co-founder and prominent AI researcher Andrej Karpathy has revisited his earlier post on X, highlighting the widening gap between those using basic AI chatbots and a small group of professionals with access to advanced frontier AI models.
According to Karpathy's rough estimates, around 6 billion people, or nearly 75 per cent of the global population, have had little to no interaction with large language models (LLMs).
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“So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time,” he wrote on X.
Meanwhile, approximately 1-2 billion people, accounting for around 20 per cent of the population, use free AI chatbots such as ChatGPT occasionally, primarily for tasks such as searching for information, writing and other basic activities.
Chatbots as improved search engines
He noted that many users still view AI chatbots as improved search engines rather than powerful tools. Even professionals outside fields such as mathematics and coding often fall into this category, as they have yet to experience the full capabilities of advanced AI models.
He further claimed that only around 5,000 people worldwide have internal access to the most advanced frontier AI systems. These systems can deploy thousands of AI agents to collaborate on large-scale software projects, identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities, conduct cyber operations and contribute to scientific and mathematical discoveries.
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However, Karpathy cautioned that human oversight and understanding are struggling to keep pace with these rapidly advancing capabilities.
Explaining the widening gap, he identified three key factors: the complexity and scale of tasks, differences in AI capabilities across domains, and varying levels of access to advanced models.
Andrej Karpathy is a prominent AI researcher, co-founder of OpenAI and former Director of AI at Tesla, where he led the development of computer vision and autonomous driving technologies.
- Published On Oct 12, 2026 at 01:13 PM IST