karpathy-2025-power-to-the-people
Karpathy, Andrej. “Power to the People: How LLMs Flip the Script on Technology Diffusion.” Karpathy, April 7, 2025. https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/power-to-the-people/.
“they generate disproportionate benefit for regular people, while their impact is a lot more muted and lagging in corporations and governments”
“it is a major multiplier to an individual’s power level across a broad range of capabilities. And the barrier to use is incredibly low - the models are cheap (free, even), fast, available to anyone on demand behind a url (or even local machine), and they speak anyone’s native language, including tone, slang or emoji”
this articles brings to light the interesting impact of LLMs on an individual scale vs at a corporate scale and speculates at the reasoning as to why this might be. The following is a really interesting articualtion of the difference:
an organization’s unique superpower is the ability to concentrate diverse expertise into a single entity by employing engineers, researchers, analysts, lawyers, marketers, etc. While LLMs can certainly make these experts more efficient individually (e.g. drafting initial legal clauses, generating boilerplate code, etc.), the improvement to the organization takes the form of becoming a bit better at the things it could already do. In contrast, an individual will usually only be an expert in at most one thing, so the broad quasi-expertise offered by the LLM fundamentally allows them to do things they couldn’t do before.
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