Karpathy Flags AI Perception Divide as Frontier Agents Show Striking Advances

Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and former Tesla AI director, says a divide has emerged in how society assesses AI. Some people still judge the technology by the hallucinations and errors of free ChatGPT in 2024, while others already use OpenAI Codex and Anthropic Claude Code for professional tasks. The gap affects how companies assess AI productivity and investment value.

A report published on May 4, 2026, said the $20-a-month ChatGPT Plus plan had become relatively mainstream, while the $200-a-month ChatGPT Pro and $100-a-month Claude Max still had few users. Karpathy said frontier agents can now work continuously for about one hour, refactor an entire codebase or uncover system vulnerabilities, compressing tasks that once took days or weeks into a few hours.