Are you an AI sceptic or a grand master?
As David Szabo-Stuban brilliantly summarized, there are five core levels of AI mastery.
These are as follows:
Level 0: The Untouched (8 billion): AI is someone else's problem. Or opportunity. Or apocalypse. Whatever, it's not theirs.
Level 1: The Normies (~800 million): Free chatbot users. Weekend warriors. For them, ChatGPT = AI and switching from GPT-4o to GPT-5 was an existential moment.
Level 2: The Power Users (~5 million): They pay $20/month because the free tier is not enough. They get limited requests, they want better models, more access. Becoming power users. Somewhat frustrated by hallucinations but still very confident in how AI will disrupt everything. They usually think there's an AI tool for everything and don't necessarily understand how they're basically all the same tech.
Level 3: The Builders (~500k): They use ChatGPT Pro or Claude Max. They build rudimentary stuff with n8n, Zapier or Make. They don't trust ChatGPT outputs anymore and have developed an intuition for spotting hallucinations. They are all in on AI but don't yet know how deep the rabbit hole goes. They dominate Linkedin with their fancy n8n workflows where they call everything an AI agent.
Level 4: The Operators (~50k): Using Claude Code or Cursor to build stuff for themselves. Learning how to navigate AI swarms for building. Learning engineering principles to get better at things. Spennd increasingly large amounts of time with plumbing context instead of typing into models. These ppl stop hyping AI, because they know how much of it is held together by WD-40 and duct tape.
Level 5: The Researchers: They don't use AI. They build it. This is PhD superstar territory, demigod level knowledge.
Notice the pattern? Each level is ~10× smaller than the last. Each wall you break through filters out 90% of the people who were with you."
(See his Lumberjack newsletter for more: https://lnkd.in/etu6VwBS)
Would you agree? Which level are you at?
➡️ Influence Builders: AI workshops for your team
This was originally posted on Andras Baneth's LinkedIn account.