Andrej Karpathy: 5,000 insiders see real AI power

Karpathy's tier breakdown comes from his own observation of how different groups interact with large language models. He notes that even many professionals outside math and code fall into the casual tier, understanding what is happening intellectually but only second-hand and abstractly.

The shift he describes has been fast. In October 2024, Karpathy dismissed AI agents as mostly marketing, but within months he stopped writing code by hand. He then joined Anthropic, despite being an OpenAI co-founder. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made a similar point in early September at the G20 Innovation Ministerial, saying a current AI coding tool could achieve in 17 minutes what a startup had previously built over three months. Karpathy says LLM capability is peaking in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable, because it emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards and companies direct training resources toward the highest revenue potential, currently coding and math.