The distance between AI superusers and rejecters could grow even further.
Andrei Karpathy can be called the philosopher king of AI. The former Tesla director and founding member of OpenAI often posts long, multi-paragraph explanations of AI trends on X. And you’ve probably heard one of his coined words make it into the dictionary as a neologism. That is “vibe coding”.
“The gap in our understanding of AI’s capabilities is widening,” Karpathy writes in his latest paper. He divided users into two groups. You’ve tried the free ChatGPT, but you’re probably everyday users who just played around with early versions of the AI chatbot, and power users who are paying to use the latest model at work.
The first layer will laugh at the AI’s quirks and hallucinations, Karpathy writes. He mentioned a viral video in which OpenAI’s voice mode answered the question early on, “Should I drive or walk to the car wash?”
“The problem is that these free models and older/deprecated models do not reflect the latest features of this year’s cutting-edge agent models,” he wrote.
Then, the second tier is users who pay for Claude Code and Codex and are “more focused on the functionality, its tilt, and various cyber-related implications.”
These users often use AI for tasks such as programming, math, and research, Karpathy wrote. That’s because these models are “peaky” in the technical realm, easier to train, and potentially more profitable, he writes.
“General queries around searching, writing, advice, etc. are not the area where we have seen the most significant and dramatic advances in functionality,” Karpathy wrote.
In his reply, Karpathy wrote that a friend suggested that OpenClaw’s moment was “huge” because it was the first time this first layer interacted with the new model.
More broadly, the public is clearly divided when it comes to the adoption of AI. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said AI is “not very popular,” citing concerns about data centers and CEOs using AI to justify layoffs. Sometimes, AI enthusiasts and aficionados come together to form what Business Insider calls a “Claude Gap relationship.”
As more people continue to try Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, or Cursor, things may change.
For now, Karpathy writes, the two groups are “talking past each other.”