Karpathy maps the LLM capability funnel: only ~0.2% use frontier models hands-on
Anxious-Yoghurt-9207 · reddit · 2026-10-12
Andrej Karpathy updated his April take: the gap in understanding LLM capability is now a sharp funnel. 75% of people have barely touched LLMs; 20% are casual free-tier users; 0.2% (20M) use frontier models hands-on in math&code; and 5,000 insiders see swarms of agents doing zero-days and frontier math. He attributes the funnel to impact scaling with ambition/problem size, capability peaks in verifiable domains driven by RL, and access tiers — "a derpy chatbot and a vertical curve, all at the same time."
Related event: Karpathy: The LLM Perception Gap Is Widening Into a Sharp Funnel(6 posts)→
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