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.
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We'll be spending a lot more time trying to understand the outputs of language models. A few thoughts, tips & tricks:
Writing. Something I've had success with: Ask your LLM to explain something in ASD-STE100, it's a controlled language specification originally developed for aerospace maintenance documentation. LLMs well-versed in this language and it comes with heavy constraints on clean writing style that I often find a lot more readable. Sometimes I've tried to soften it a bit e.g. ask for "80% of the way to ASD-STE100" because the spec is quite stringent. But even better:
Diagrams / images. Instead of writing, ask your LLM to create a diagram. These can be a lot easier to process, parse, and understand. But even better:
Web pages. Ask for output "in HTML" to get a beautiful, interactive webpage. LLMs are getting really good at frontend and can create beautiful experiences, animations, etc. But even better:
Explainer videos. The output format I am most bullish on is fully custom / bespoke explainer videos generated on any arbitrary topic. Experiment with things like "Create a 3b1b style video explainer on X. Use my ElevenLabs API key for audio narration". (you'd need an API key for the latter or you can ask your LLM to find you decent free alternatives that use your local compute). This is actually starting to work!
In summary:
- As LLMs get better, they will do more and more of the legwork autonomously, and a lot more of our work will rise up the abstractions into oversight and understanding.
- Luckily, LLMs can help here too because as intelligence and code are increasingly abundant, you can ask for large, custom, discardable software artifacts (e.g. web apps, video explainers) that would have never made sense to create before. Push the boundaries here and you'll be surprised.
for those that don't grasp how crazy this is
GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst vs Ideogram 4.5
and by the way it's likely just simple masking/in-painting but it still surprises me it's not the default for the majority of image editing models.
you can tell it's in-painting because you can see the bush around my shoulder slowly turn into a line. it's the same reason my tattoos fade on why side of my arm (the closest to my t-shirt).
no excuse for chopping of half of my head though.
I'm going to have to try a workflow where I use this on every frame of a video.
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Hi,
Tomorrow we are re-opening the Pro $200 subscriptions to new subscribers, but together with it we are also changing how we calculate the usage for it. In effect, if you do the math, it will net out at half the dollar in API spend compared to the old Pro $200 plan.
Now that it's said, let me explain why this is happening and why you will still get more work done than if you were on the Pro $200 subscription one month ago.
(a) We didn't want to compromise in other ways and are committing to not reintroducing the 5h limit, so that you can fully use the weekly usage when you want.
(b) On the subscription, we guarantee that over time you always get more work done and with an increasing level of quality. This means that you will continue to get more value per dollar spent as a result of models getting more efficient and us passing down the improvements in the form of API price reductions.
(c) We don't want to put an incentive on ourselves to artificially inflate the API list prices to make it look like you are getting a lot (and workaround it through discounts, etc). Instead we want to continue to both rapidly reduce prices and increase capabilities of models on the API. This week we introduced GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna at 50% of their previous price. Over time, we see prices go low enough that it makes sense for most to buy usage as needed without there being a significant gap between what you get in a subscription and what you get in the API for a dollar spent.
(d) Tomorrow, we are adding more things to the subscription that won't draw on the usage, I won't reveal what that is yet.
I wanted to be transparent before all the big announcements tomorrow. Lots of new exciting things are coming to the subscriptions that will make it super compelling, but I wanted to make sure to share this change ahead of time so you can all understand it before we shower you with good news.
Codexingly,
Tibo