Oleg Spiridonov

[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.

[Oleg Spiridonov @spiridonovoa]

@elonmusk And there is absolutely no information on the News about it

[Oleg Spiridonov @spiridonovoa]

@elonmusk Why nobody show in Social medias how Zelensky and Ukrainian government made genocide of Ukraine population? They are kidnapping people from the streets to send them to the army. And nobody shows it in the news. They kidnap people from their cars and send them to the army.

[Oleg Spiridonov @spiridonovoa]

@Crazymoments01 @elonmusk Personally

[Oleg Spiridonov @spiridonovoa]

@elonmusk Make America healthy again!

[Oleg Spiridonov @spiridonovoa]

@elonmusk Ilon, you're looking from the top. Why should humanity focus on fights and wars instead of focusing on science and prosperity? Is there a chance to stop wasting our time and energy for the shit and focus on important things?

[Oleg Spiridonov @spiridonovoa]

@ambercamel @LangmanVince @TuckerCarlson Nobody is bombing civilians infrastructure there. Infrastructure can be accidentally damaged with a missile shoted down by air defense

[Oleg Spiridonov @spiridonovoa]

@lexfridman @TuckerCarlson I'm Ukrainian and I think most of the Ukrainians want to stop this bloody war. Nobody just asks them. Politicians do whatever they want and force people go to the war. There is no freedom in Ukraine anymore, just war propaganda.

[Oleg Spiridonov @spiridonovoa]

@elonmusk Isn't immigrants good for economy in long term?

[Oleg Spiridonov @spiridonovoa]

@elonmusk When BBC found hate about BBC...

[Oleg Spiridonov @spiridonovoa]

@ElizabethSwaney @elonmusk Elevator rides 🤔 Sounds like you know what's going on there better than anyone else

[Oleg Spiridonov @spiridonovoa]

@elonmusk How about create a new icon "Rocket going down"? 😁

[Oleg Spiridonov @spiridonovoa]

@NameFILIP @elonmusk @Tesla I hope they will fix it quickly

[I Am Devloper @iamdevloper]

The software development process

i can’t fix this

*crisis of confidence*
*questions career*
*questions life*

oh it was a typo, cool