The big picture: The disconnect is showing up everywhere — from job-loss fears to data center protests to actual violence.
Doubters still see AI as glitchy chatbots and viral fails. They aren't using its full capabilities.Power users run AI agents around the clock, trading tips on how to automate work and decision-making. Resisters understand AI, think they know where it's headed and want no part of it.
What they're saying: "There is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability," former OpenAI and Tesla AI leader, Andrej Karpathy posted on X. He added that many people let a single session with ChatGPT's free tier define their view of AI.
Meanwhile, Karpathy told the "No Priors" podcast that he now spends
16 hours a day issuing commands to AI
agent swarms and rushes to exhaust his tokens every month. "AI adoption is a tale of two cities," Box CEO Aaron Levie
said on X.
By the numbers: It's a virtuous cycle. Power users have more success and more productivity boosts than casual users.
Between the lines: The third group of resisters are getting louder.
In Indianapolis, a legislator said his home was
hit by gunfire, with a note left behind saying 'no more data centers.'And on Friday, a man
was arrested for allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's home and had also visited OpenAI's offices before being taken into custody.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that someone with the same name as the suspect has published anti-AI essays and participated in a PauseAI Discord server. PauseAI is an activist group that advocates halting AI development.
State of play: Protests are becoming more common in San Francisco, where many AI firms are based, and in communities targeted for new data centers.
A growing number of workers with technical skills fear AI will make them obsolete.In a
viral post, a Meta engineer captured a spreading anxiety. "I'm done with tech and I'm done with this unfair world," the engineer wrote.
Altman expressed optimism in a post after the attack, while acknowledging public fear and concern.
"It will not all go well," Altman wrote. "The fear and anxiety about AI is justified; we are in the process of witnessing the largest change to society in a long time, and perhaps ever."
Bottom line: The people building and using AI at full power are living in a very different world from everyone else.
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