George

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel.

- Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all.
- Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract.
- Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code.
- And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while.

The funnel is driven by a combination of factors:
1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel.
2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel.
3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal.

So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.

[George @AuthenticGeorge]

@TracketPacer Dig?

[George @AuthenticGeorge]

@cnnbrk He says this every time he loses the lead in the model race. No coincidence @OpenAI Astra came out. He was quiet when Fable was in the lead.

[George @AuthenticGeorge]

@FaureLorenzo1 @nerdalert This guy even had his blinker on. Thank goodness for FSD here.

[George @AuthenticGeorge]

@Liv_Boeree @sama @DanielleFong @huggingface Absolutely nuts

[Federalist Society @FedSoc]

One vote stood between America and independence. The man who had to cast it was 80 miles away, battling cancer, as a violent thunderstorm raged. His name was Caesar Rodney.

A lesser-known founder of the American Revolution, Rodney rode overnight on horseback from Delaware to Philadelphia, arriving just in time to cast the deciding vote for independence and sign the Declaration of Independence. 🇺🇲

[Whole Mars Catalog @wholemars]

If you love them, make sure they're in a Tesla.

Note that this wasn't even in self-driving mode. The car protected him even when it was being driven manually.

[George @AuthenticGeorge]

Yes!

[George @AuthenticGeorge]

@nickbaumann_ I’ve been doing the same thing with Claude remote control for a while but have been using VNC from my laptop to kick off new jobs on my Mac mini. This looks like a more clean approach using Codex.

[George @AuthenticGeorge]

@Tesla I really hate the turn signals being top and bottom and turning on the wheel. I wish there was a better design pattern. Also flipping forward and reverse. They’re reversed from normal gear shifts.

[George @AuthenticGeorge]

@bennbuilds @kemfic That’s awesome. Looking forward to your future success and the point of wondering what it was like without this technology.

[George @AuthenticGeorge]

@twostraws @AppStore Congrats Paul! My kids have so much fun playing it.

[George @AuthenticGeorge]

My Tesla has ruined other cars for me. My Audi rental car feels like they got it from Temu.

[George @AuthenticGeorge]

@Steph3nSims You’re not running Doom on an AirTag yet?

[George @AuthenticGeorge]

@H3KTlC You definitely have to try it. It complements the bike so well and gives you the same experience.

[George @AuthenticGeorge]

@elonmusk @imPenny2x Are there any updates on plans for us on AI3? I bought my FSD during the period when it was $15k…

[George @AuthenticGeorge]

@MsLouiseGlover Wow people are terrible. She has had an account since 2009 and a quick scroll shows you this is abnormal. No other posts like this.

We haven’t met but I hope your surgery is successful and your doctors can save your life.

[George @AuthenticGeorge]

@elonmusk @jasonlk I’d be curious what corporate structure you used to prevent your stake in the company from being diluted beyond majority control when the board went against you.