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.
Your side projects should be compounding very fast with AI. Every problem solved can be re-used or extracted into a generic module. Every design decision should make the next thing beautiful by default. Your agents should be constantly stealing from your past decisions.
Ways I like to work and experiment: For this search input component, I can strip away pretty much all of the surrounding UI and focus entirely on the component in isolation.
From there, I can quickly jump between different states, bringing back parts of the UI or the full context to experiment with patterns, behaviors, and interactions.
🗞️ if your team is too busy doing their 'normal job' to experiment with AI, you're preparing them to be replaced
https://t.co/KTaIgFpvpK
In this post, I guess this's the last time I'll say it. AI use is no longer optional if you wish to be employed. What follows is advice for current employees and hiring managers on how to hire in 2026 to source AI-first candidates.
Introducing Claude Haiku 5.5: the cheapest, fastest, and most capable small model we’ve ever released.
On average, it costs around 75% less to run than Claude Haiku 4.5.
Ben Affleck (Hollywood star & Artists Equity CEO) talks about how he fine-tunes open video models by unfreezing weights and trained only the last cinematic layer so a film crew can hit real production standards.
for context, Ben Affleck founded InterPositive in 2022, a 16-person AI shop for film post and Netflix bought it in March 2026 for $587 mn in cash.
He needed that model because public video models were trained on his peers' films, and he did not think that was a real business. So InterPositive raised money, shot its own dataset for 8 months on a controlled stage, and used it only as late-stage training.
Each new film then trains a private model on its own dailies, so the production keeps the footage and the learning. That is the product Netflix paid $587 million for.
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From "Bloomberg Live" YouTube channel, (link in comment)
For years, maybe a decade, I've wanted to build a writing tool that just did a few things I couldn't find anywhere else.
A system that mimicked how I think when I write. A system that provided clear affordances, features, and places to do the things I wanted to do. A way to play with my writing as I'm writing it. A way to settle into just the right way to say something.
It never made sense to make it a 37signals product because it's not commercially viable, nor would it be worth pulling people off their other work to hack on this. Plus, it would have taken months the old way.
So this weekend I just made it myself, with Claude's help.
It's called Write_On and the short video walks you through it.
Essentially it's "alternative control" at the word, sentence, and paragraph level, plus a way to dim stuff back, and stash stuff near by. Not version control, but alternative control. You'll see what I mean when you watch the video below.
So here it is. Write_On.
Google’s new Gemini 4 Argon equals GPT-6 Astra on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 60% of the Cost per Task with discounted prices. Google is now back to being one of the top three labs in intelligence achieved
Gemini 4 Argon is @GoogleDeepMind’s first proprietary model above the Flash class in over 7 months. With high reasoning (the highest available), it scores 53 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, matching GPT-6 Astra (max, 53) and 1 point ahead of GPT-6.1 Sol (max, 52), with gains driven by lower hallucinations and stronger agentic capabilities.
At its current 50% pricing discount and with cache discounts increased to 95%, Gemini 4 Argon costs $1.99 per Intelligence Index task, 60% of GPT-6 Astra (max), but 2.7x GPT-6.1 Sol (max). After the discount ends, this will rise to $3.98 (~1.2x GPT-6 Astra (max)).
Gemini 4 Argon is currently being rolled out to selected users and is not publicly available. The 50% discount is an initial promotion. Google has not yet confirmed the promotion end date
Key benchmarking results for Gemini 4 Argon with high reasoning:
➤ Google returns as one of the top three labs on intelligence: Gemini 4 Argon (high) scores 53 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, matching GPT-6 Astra (max, 53) and 1 point ahead of GPT-6.1 Sol (max, 52). This is 23 points above Google’s previous non-Flash model, Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview (30) and 12 points ahead of Gemini 3.8 Flash (high)
➤ Launch discounts of 50% make Gemini 4 Argon competitive on Cost per Task: At current discounted pricing, Gemini 4 Argon (high) costs $1.99 per Intelligence Index task, 60% of GPT-6 Astra (max, $3.26) for a comparable level of intelligence. This cost efficiency is driven by lower token prices, rather than reduced token use, with Gemini 4 Argon averaging 62k output tokens per task, compared with 27k for GPT-6 Astra (max). Google has not yet confirmed the promotion end date, but on standard pricing, Cost per Task will increase to $3.98
➤ Stronger agentic performance: Historically a weaker area for Gemini models, Gemini 4 Argon shows improvements across agentic evaluations. It ranks #1 on AutomationBench-AA at 77.5%, 6 points ahead of Claude Sonnet 5.5 (max, 71.3%). On Terminal Bench 4, Gemini 4 Argon achieves 57%, a +53 point improvement from Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview, only behind Claude Sonnet 5.5 (max, 64%), Claude Opus 5.5 (max, 60%) and GPT-6 Astra (59%). On AA-Briefcase, it reaches 1494 Elo. This is driven by a 65% rubric pass rate, the highest we have recorded, but lower Analytical Quality (1576 Elo) and Presentation Quality (1308 Elo)
➤ Lowest hallucination rate among leading models: On AA-Omniscience, Gemini 4 Argon has a 15% hallucination rate, the lowest of any model scoring 45+ on the Intelligence Index, compared with 51% for GPT-6 Astra (max) and 54% for GPT-6.1 Sol (max). This means Argon is much more likely to acknowledge when it does not know an answer rather than guess incorrectly. On accuracy, Gemini 4 Argon scores 50%, a 5 point decrease from Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview, and 13 points below GPT-6 Astra (max, 63%). With this slightly lower accuracy, its overall AA-Omniscience score of 42 remains in line with GPT-6 Astra (43) and GPT-6.1 Sol (42)
Key model details:
➤ Context Window: 1M tokens
➤ Multimodality: Text, image, video, and speech input, with text output
➤ Pricing: $4/$20 per 1M input/output tokens at standard pricing, currently discounted 50% to $2/$10. Cached input tokens receive a 95% discount ($0.10 per 1M at discounted pricing), up from 90% on Gemini 3.8 Flash
➤ Long Decode Continuation: We tested Gemini 4 Argon with Long Decode Continuation, a new Gemini API feature that pauses long responses and resumes them across follow-up calls. This lets reasoning run up to 1M output tokens without request timeouts
Introducing Gemini 4 Argon, our new frontier model, rolling out to cyber defenders starting today, and more widely as soon as possible. I am really excited by the progress we have made here. Argon is priced at $2 in and $10 out during introductory pricing!
Over the last 5 years, I've used every social investing product -- but they all tend to fail in one key spot:
Closing the gap between (a) your belief about the world and (b) how to express that belief with stocks.
Mike reached out early in the summer and showed me @Supertake, which solves this problem in the most fun way possible: prompt with AI and it constructs a portfolio around your belief.
With the declining cost of intelligence, we're going to see much more sophisticated investing styles emerge that was previously reserved only for hedge funds.
Today we announced the Claude-led discovery of a molecular machine that we suspect could represent a new gene editing mechanism. Its precise function, biotechnological utility (if any), or level of significance is not yet clear, but at minimum it is work I would have been proud to do as a PhD student. The work was done mostly, though not entirely, by Claude: our life sciences team suggested a broad area of research, Claude read through the literature and a bunch of genome data and discovered something interesting, then Claude proposed experiments to verify the discovery and our team carried them out.
It’s easy to dismiss this as a one-off or curiosity, but we’ve repeatedly seen a pattern where AI performance in new intellectual domains goes from weak to superhuman in a matter of a few years. In 2023 models struggled to do math at the level of an average high-school student. In 2024 they started to do well on math competitions for the best high-schoolers in the country, in 2025 they started to solve minor open problems, in early 2026 more significant open problems, and in late 2026 they are beginning to solve the top few open problems in all of mathematics. We believe AI for biology is on a similar exponential trend.
The main difference between biology and mathematics, of course, is that math can be done purely theoretically, while biology requires experimentation. Some have used this to draw the conclusion that AI’s utility in biology will be limited. We think this is wrong. As we’ve demonstrated today, humans can collaborate with AI to perform the experiments, validate key results in a few weeks and, if necessary, work with the AI to iterate on what they find. Eventually it may even be possible for Claude itself to safely perform the experiments by autonomously controlling lab equipment, with appropriate safeguards in place, but we aren’t doing that today (our lab is also a BSL1/BSL2 facility that doesn't handle materials dangerous to humans).
More broadly, biomedical advancement has many stages — from fundamental biology discoveries, to translational research, to drug discovery, clinical trials, and finally the actual delivery of medicines and health care to patients. We are also interested in these later stages, but even simply accelerating the first stage of fundamental biological discoveries has the potential to speed up and broaden the entire pipeline. Improving our understanding of biology and sharpening biologists’ tools can drive forward all of the later stages, for example by identifying new drug targets, finding new therapeutic modalities, allowing for more precise measurement, and speeding up the experimental loop which itself further accelerates our understanding of biology. This will not in itself speed up clinical trial times, but if it succeeds it could greatly increase the number of promising candidates that go into the pipeline — an increase in throughput even though latency remains.
In Machines of Loving Grace, I wrote about AI’s potential to “cure most diseases in 5-10 years” — a goal that sounds impossible, but one I believe is just barely possible if AI is applied to every stage of the pipeline. The first step is showing that AI can first help with, and then drive, biological discoveries.
Claude’s discovery is the latest in a line of related prior work that goes back decades, beginning with systems like CRISPR, and continuing with discoveries like the bridge recombinase and VIPR in the past few years. Recently, there has been heightened interest in systems based on reverse transcriptase (RT) enzymes, the enzyme underlying the system Claude identified. And most recently, a Stanford team working independently described a novel RT system with an associated non-coding array that is in some ways similar to the one Claude found, though they are distinct systems that evolved independently from each other. I believe that we’re at the very beginning of finding such systems and developing them into powerful tools for biotechnology.
I’m proud of the resources Anthropic has invested in accelerating the public benefits of AI through the life sciences, and we’re aiming both to grow our life sciences team and to work with other scientists to extend this approach to a broad range of problems. If you have a proposal for a research collaboration or are interested in joining our life sciences team, please reach out.
This inner and outer loop of judgement is such a key idea I had to draw my own version.
It maps to what @tobi called "autonomy vs accountability".
The inner loop is autonomy. The outer loop is accountability. The inner loop is the "problem box" for creativity.