The AI playing field is no longer level.
(The few who know how to use it are pulling ahead in output and income.)
Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI founding member, sorts AI users into 4 levels. Each step up has fewer people and far more output.
■ Level 1: about 6 billion people. Barely use AI.
■ Level 2: 1 to 2 billion. Free chatbots for quick answers, search and text edits.
■ Level 3: about 20 million. Paid models finish weeks or months of project work from one written brief.
■ Level 4: about 5,000 inside the top AI labs. Thousands of agents working for weeks. One unreleased OpenAI model produced 722 math papers from about 4,000 unsolved problems.
His own label: napkin numbers.
Here's how a firm moves up a level: give AI a multi-day job with results you can check, and test it on a current paid tool.
A CPA firm, an agency, a brokerage or a dental practice can sit at Level 2 while a competitor works at Level 3.
Same tools on the market. The gap is how you use them.
Save this.
Which level is your team or organization at?
Sources: Andrej Karpathy, post on X, Oct 11, 2026. OpenAI "math" GitHub repo, Oct 6, 2026. Both explained by AI学长小林 on YouTube, "你还觉得 AI 没用？Karpathy：全球约5000人，正在用另一种级别的 AI！", Oct 12, 2026.