The AI Skill Gap Is Widening - Andrej Karpathy

Yesterday, in a post on X, Andrej Karpathy put his finger on a phenomenon a lot of us AI builders and developers have been feeling. Well, me for sure anyway. If you spend any time online or even chatting at a barbecue, there feels like there is this growing gap in understanding of AI capabilities and

potential. As someone who has been deep in building agents for the last 4 years, it's easy to get confused as to why everyone is not using these tools to their full advantage every single day. I have many thoughts on why this is, but first, here's a breakdown of what Andrej is saying with some graphics to help

illustrate. And after going through this breakdown, my takeaway is going to be most of us aren't anywhere near as ambitious enough with these models. That includes me, and I'm going to show you where I got it wrong. But first, let's look at where this all came from. So, back in April, Karpathy posted that he

was seeing this growing gap in how people understand and use AI. On one side, people who tried maybe the free version of ChatGPT, they're kind of just using it as an advanced version of Google for the most part. They've seen some hallucinations, some quirks, the strawberry thing, how many hours are in a strawberry, the car wash thing, and

they kind of write it off a little bit. On the other side, you have people that went deep on this. People that are paying for frontier agents like Codex, Cloud Code, and using them professionally for coding, maths, and research. And for building their businesses. So, he's saying that second group, and I would count myself as in that second

group, has the highest amount of AI psychosis. Because the improvements have been, as he quotes, nothing short of staggering. And I definitely have felt that myself at particular points. Back in December, we had a huge jump where the models were just getting everything I wanted done correctly with very little issues. I'm feeling that again recently