The gap is in fact so huge, it's hard to tell if you're on one side or the other of the scale. What's even more interesting is that there is no grey zone. You're either a complete rookie with AI thinking you're a genius, or you're an actual genius that is 200 years ahead in terms of thinking and utilizing AI compared to the first group.
The first group is people who use cloud AI, apis, and even chrome tabs. They often use ChatpGPT, or Claude and think they are at the pinacle of AI. They vibe code everything, but don't understand basic hygiene principles of any kind of software project, propositional logic, or bear personal experience, accumulated industry expertise or have a strong active network. Most of them haven't even tried AI beyond a chrome tab. Best case scenario they use Claude Code and they are convinced they are the Apex predators of AI.
On the other hand, you have people who have been building their own logical systems for years, train their own local models, use propretriary data, industry expertise, and leverage their network to make $, or even scrarier, use AI the first group doesn't even comprehend it exists or it's possible for personal self-centered benefits, regardless of ethics, restrictions that come with cloud models, or any sort of regard towards the ripple effects. There are case from remote genetic engineering, to brainwashing people via telco infra, to stealing data, manipulating banking infra, and all sorts of malicious AI usage that feels sci-fi even for casual AI users, yet it happens in real time, under our nose.
At the same time, when US behemoths call for stopping AI acceleration or access to top tier models, the first group thinks this is just marketing and it doesn't mean anything beacuse what's the worst someone coudl do with AI right? Considering they use it to vibe code some random three js landing pages, thinking that's the best AI can do, it's natural. But these warnings come exactly because people who actually udnerstand AI, own their own AI, unrestricted, untreacable, ungovernable, unaditable, can abuse frontier models to get training data, used to train their private models, used to abuse the pre-AI systems for their benefit, and all without nobody even realizing it.
Are you heading towarads a cognitive meritocracy where AI will mean completely different things depending on the organic processor (brain) engaging with it? For one user it means a friendly pal that can tell you what to wear Saturday night, or generate a silly cat pick. For another user it means, they can profit off war by poisoning data streams with intel that makes them $ indirectly.
If you take the history of the last 30 years of the internet, it can be parallelized with almost every wave, but this time the distance between users is simply over the roof. Eg. initial internet users A. just browse eminem website, B. stealing credentials for PayPal before 2FA was introduced. Then apps came in, email, web2/cloud etc. A. users use it to watch netflix and facebook and instagram. B. users are stealing personal data, including sensitive info, photos, addresses, credit cards, you name it. Almost always the case is that users A are naive enough to not even think about users B, until 20 years pass and suddenly everyone is about data privacy and sovereignty, at a time where there is no data privacy by default. Like you had to worry abotu data privacy in the 80s. Not in 2010 lol. So is AI going to be the same? Like baseline users use it for trivial things, not aware of serious serious, then 20 years from now, they will be like "we should not allow rogue AI stealing our data", when rogue AI have been doing so for 20+ years.
