Karpathy's AI funnel: 75% of humanity barely touches LLMs, ~5K have frontier access
burny_tech · x · 2026-10-12
A viral graphic dubbed "Karpathy's AI Funnel" layers global LLM usage: 6B people (75%) have no meaningful contact with LLMs; 1-2B (20%) are casual free-tier users; 20M (0.2%) use frontier models professionally for math and code, compressing weeks-long projects into a prompt; and only 5K (0.0006%) have internal access to frontier systems, running agent swarms on mega-projects where human comprehension is starting to fall behind. Attribution to Karpathy is unconfirmed, but the stratification is a striking framing of the emerging "permanent underclass."
Related event: Karpathy: LLM Perception Gap Is Widening Into a Sharp Funnel(26 posts)→
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