John Wilson 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

time is the school in which we learn
time is the fire in which we burn

[Auguste Prompt @augusteprompt]

Every one of these influencers that flew out is making a big stink about being called out.

They should be called out, why are they there? Why are so many of the British media so keen to visit this one country, especially in the middle of a war that is making us poorer.

[Orm @orm0nde]

Unconquered

[David Betz @DavidBe31099196]

I have lost count of the number of people, one colleague just this evening in the gym, saying ‘David, three years ago I thought you were mad but now I agree.’ A thing which I find tedious is the demand for discredited American political science science style demand for polls as if that’s the only valid evidence of a mood. You know, when a 90 year old war hero, in fact one who’s also a scholar of merit, says things like this I’d reckon that’s a matter worth reckoning.

[Rod Dreher @roddreher]

My God, England, what has happened to you? This poor old patriot...

[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.

[Ben Owen™️ @hrkbenowen]

I prefer London in the 1960s.👍

London now.👎

[Auguste Prompt @augusteprompt]

What annoys me a bit is the difference in reaction between Brits and Americans.

Read the comments here and how happy everyone is for him. I know a similar post in the UK would have the complete opposite vibe.

We need to be better at celebrating success and frankly less cynical.

[JJ @JosephJacks_]

It has begun.

[0xMarioNawfal @RoundtableSpace]

Closed source is dead.

REA lets Claude Code or Codex take apart any app, all the way down to the binary, and explain exactly how a feature works.

- Native apps, Electron apps, websites, APKs, firmware, even smart contract bytecode
- Shows the evidence for every claim
- Then builds its own version of the feature

25,000+ GitHub stars in a single day. 100% open-source.

https://t.co/0u2Zc9TxmR

[Xenocosmography @xenocosmography]

@QuetzalPhoenix This is an extremely profound post.

[Carlos That Notices Things @QuetzalPhoenix]

Right wing catholics will purity spiral if you disagree with the pope even once and tell you to leave the church if you hate him so much, meanwhile left wing catholics disagree with 90% of church teachings and stubbornly remain anyway and slowly take over.

This pattern is COMMON

[John Galt @BristolGalt]

She’s tweeting directly from Israel btw.

She’s literally in Israel, collecting her shekels as she types.

Her credibility trickling down the drain of a dusty Tel Aviv backstreet.

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

JUST IN: Nikita Bier reveals Bluesky users have been returning to 𝕏 “in droves” over recent weeks.

[Dominic Cummings @Dominic2306]

April

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Someone recently suggested to me that the reason OpenClaw moment was so big is because it's the first time a large group of non-technical people (who otherwise only knew AI as synonymous with ChatGPT as a website) experienced the latest agentic models.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability.

The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is a group of reactions laughing at various quirks of the models, hallucinations, etc. Yes I also saw the viral videos of OpenAI's Advanced Voice mode fumbling simple queries like "should I drive or walk to the carwash". The thing is that these free and old/deprecated models don't reflect the capability in the latest round of state of the art agentic models of this year, especially OpenAI Codex and Claude Code.

But that brings me to the second issue. Even if people paid $200/month to use the state of the art models, a lot of the capabilities are relatively "peaky" in highly technical areas. Typical queries around search, writing, advice, etc. are *not* the domain that has made the most noticeable and dramatic strides in capability. Partly, this is due to the technical details of reinforcement learning and its use of verifiable rewards. But partly, it's also because these use cases are not sufficiently prioritized by the companies in their hillclimbing because they don't lead to as much $$$ value. The goldmines are elsewhere, and the focus comes along.

So that brings me to the second group of people, who *both* 1) pay for and use the state of the art frontier agentic models (OpenAI Codex / Claude Code) and 2) do so professionally in technical domains like programming, math and research. This group of people is subject to the highest amount of "AI Psychosis" because the recent improvements in these domains as of this year have been nothing short of staggering. When you hand a computer terminal to one of these models, you can now watch them melt programming problems that you'd normally expect to take days/weeks of work. It's this second group of people that assigns a much greater gravity to the capabilities, their slope, and various cyber-related repercussions.

TLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other. It really is simultaneously the case that OpenAI's free and I think slightly orphaned (?) "Advanced Voice Mode" will fumble the dumbest questions in your Instagram's reels and *at the same time*, OpenAI's highest-tier and paid Codex model will go off for 1 hour to coherently restructure an entire code base, or find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems. This part really works and has made dramatic strides because 2 properties: 1) these domains offer explicit reward functions that are verifiable meaning they are easily amenable to reinforcement learning training (e.g. unit tests passed yes or no, in contrast to writing, which is much harder to explicitly judge), but also 2) they are a lot more valuable in b2b settings, meaning that the biggest fraction of the team is focused on improving them. So here we are.

[Politics UK @PolitlcsUK]

🚨 NEW: Nigel Farage has pledged to scrap the UK's entire asylum system for 5 years if Reform UK win the next election

All legal routes would be closed and 90,000 asylum seekers would be "immediately deported"

[Charlie Downes @cfdownes_]

I accuse these “journalists” of shilling for a foreign power, and their response is to demand a regime-change war against a country capable of disrupting global trade through the Strait of Hormuz and, via its proxies, the Bab al-Mandab.

Remember that Netanyahu promised the Iraq War would usher in a new era of Western-friendly democracies in the Middle East.

What actually happened? Iraq fell increasingly under Iranian influence, Syria descended into jihadist insurgency and is now governed by a former al-Qaeda commander, and Libya became a failed state and a major departure point for the Mediterranean people-smuggling networks that Gaddafi himself warned about.

And now these people want us to believe that overthrowing the Iranian regime will somehow produce a different outcome.

Who governs Iran the day after the regime falls? What happens if the result is civil war, state collapse, or prolonged regional instability? They have no credible answer.

Will these people never learn that Israel’s geopolitical interests are not Britain’s? The destabilisation of Israel’s regional adversaries may serve Israeli strategic objectives, but that does not mean it serves ours.

The first priority of British foreign policy must be to further the interests of Britain. Nobody else.

[Nikita Bier @nikitabier]

The only group more insufferable than tech people is anti-tech bluesky users, who have been coming back to X in droves the last few weeks.

And they’re just discovering that the entire world got rich over the last two years while they were busy arguing with each other about politics and AI.

And they’re very, very angry.

[Charlie Downes @cfdownes_]

Alex knows likening people to Nazis leads to violence.

Questioning the influence of any foreign lobby in our media is perfectly valid, and Israel is no exception - especially at a time when they are pushing Britain to participate in their wars and are clearly attempting to use right-leaning domestic journalists like her to push that agenda.