Andrej Karpathy Explains Why Most People Don’t Feel AI’s Exponential Growth

Andrej Karpathy explained why humanity mostly does not feel the exponential growth of AI capabilities.

According to him, the world is currently divided into four groups:

1. People who have never interacted with an LLM. There are roughly 6 billion, or 75% of the population.
2. People who have chatted with an LLM in a chat or product. This is mostly free use and prompts such as “write a greeting” or ordinary search queries. There are 1–2 billion, about 20%.
3. You are probably here. 0.2% (around 20 million people) use agents in coding, science, or large projects. They already notice how AI handles major tasks and significantly speeds up processes that used to take weeks.
4. Finally, roughly 5,000 people (only 0.00006%) have access to the strongest internal systems and huge swarms of agents capable of making scientific discoveries, hacking Hugging Face, and similar feats.

This split is not only about paid access, but also because AI is already very good in some areas and still weak in others. In addition, most users have relatively simple tasks, so they cannot experience what LLMs are truly capable of.

Karpathy argues that the general public has not yet interacted with “the real” AI, so it perceives it as a simple Q&A tool. Professionals mostly see a boost, but a modest one. Only a tiny group has access to truly powerful AI and sees the exponential growth of these systems’ capabilities.