Marco Guardigli

multi-entrepeneur, engineer, ict infrastructure architect, dad, sci-tech fan, rc-model builder, arduino, fablab maker, dog lover ... & more

[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.

[Marco Guardigli @mgua]

Ah now i see! this is why Sam Altman has this name: Alt-man. Another man. Alt-er ego.

Zuck had to change company name to get cool (Meta) but @sama had it straight from the beginning!! :-)

[Tom Davenport @TomDavenport]

Sam Altman wants to make a mirror of you in ChatGPT. He wants to pay you a share of the economic activity you and your alt produce. World coin becomes the passport to this new economy, verified by eyeball scanning. This is the only way I can make sense of Altman’s biz portfolio.

[INGVterremoti @INGVterremoti]

🟡🟡[STIMA #PROVVISORIA] #terremoto Magnitudo tra 4 e 4.5 ore 09:27 IT del 13-01-2026, prov/zona Forl%EC-Cesena #INGV_44944142

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.

[Marco Guardigli @mgua]

@theladyjane_ women

[Marco Guardigli @mgua]

@MAstronomers Elonia

[Marco Guardigli @mgua]

@Wisdom_HQ it was over.

[Marco Guardigli @mgua]

@sciencegirl godzilla

[🎼🌺Music Love♥️ @ThoNg676733]

One of the greatest pieces of music ever written💖
JE NE REGRETTE RIEN - (I don't regret anything)

[Rock'n Roll of All @rocknrollofall]

When a song is eight minutes long and you still can't get enough of it every time. That's what you call a classic.

Don McLean performing 'American Pie' live at the The Paramount Theatre in Austin, Texas, in 1999.

[Marco Guardigli @mgua]

@xKnowledgeBANK dont remember the version but it was when windows was the interface needed for excel, on top of msdos. we had windows for 286 and the more powerful windows/386. i think it was windows 1 or windows 2 and it came with excel

[Marco Guardigli @mgua]

@InterestingSTEM 40

[Hillary Clinton @HillaryClinton]

It’s not his house.

It’s your house.

And he’s destroying it.

[Marco Guardigli @mgua]

@Rainmaker1973 Progress

[Linus ✦ Ekenstam @LinusEkenstam]

One man creates a 3min AI short and it’s breaking the internet.

[Frances 'Cassandra' Coppola @Frances_Coppola]

Crows are intelligent.

[Marco Guardigli @mgua]

Il problema é gravissimo ma non é solo americano prof. Capua. Basta guardare i commenti…
Il destino della scienza é nelle mani di ignoranti arroganti.

[Ilaria Capua @ilariacapua]

Non si può rimanere in silenzio.

[Interesting STEM @InterestingSTEM]

The best way to teach people critical thinking is to teach them to write

[Marco Guardigli @mgua]

@Arypigliate2 Grazie. Hai spiegato bene quanto il percorso, interiore, medico e formale sia complesso. Lo hai fatto in modo chiaro e comprensibile. Grazie da parte di un ignorante in materia, che augura a te e a tutte le persone in ambasce simili di essere persone moderne, accettate e libere.

[𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗠𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗰 ✨🎵 @Hoang_HQ]

☘️This was an accomplished performance with excellent tone. Bravo !👏👏💖💖
🎺🎺𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐨 𝐝𝐞 𝐀𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐣𝐮𝐞𝐳, 𝐅𝐥𝐮𝐠𝐞𝐥𝐡𝐨𝐫𝐧 𝐒𝐨𝐥𝐨🌷🌷