Claude launched publicly 43 months ago, and Anthropic is expected to go public at a $1.5 to $2 Trillion valuation. Here’s the 335 page S-1 in an 8 minute explainer video.
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.
I was encouraged this week to see the leaders of the frontier labs agree on the need for them to slow down the pace of AI development. Given the stakes, it’s a good and necessary first step.
But I’m even more encouraged by the growing recognition that how this powerful new technology develops should be at the center of our public debate.
I’ve been watching the progress on AI for over a decade now, and one thing that’s clear to me is that the potential impact of this technology is not overhyped. It’s also moving at lightning speed – and even faster than those who are engineering it can keep up with.
I’m not an AI accelerationist who believes it will lead to some techno-utopia, and I’m not a doomer who thinks it will inevitably lead to humanity’s destruction.
But whether this technology results in amazing breakthroughs in medicine, energy and education or unleashes huge economic disruptions, greater inequality, and potential catastrophe will depend on the choices that we make right now – choices that should be made not just by the companies involved, but by all of us.
For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter.
AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country.
Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.
The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.
https://t.co/AUKzoQ5Ikb
Today we share the worldview behind our mission.
Human values don't average out. Local knowledge can't be centralized. The good future has many AIs, raised in different places, shaped by the people they serve, disagreeing with each other the way we do.
https://t.co/A14SurOM2K
This is a super exciting release - Claude Fable 5 is the same underlying model as Mythos but with added safeguards. The benchmarks are great and it's SOTA on everything by a margin but I'll add that *qualitatively* also, this is a major-version-bump-deserving step change forward (imo of the same order as Claude 4.5 was in November), peaking especially for long problem-solving sessions on very difficult problems. You can give it a lot more ambitious tasks than what you're used to, the model "gets it" and it will just go, and it's never felt this tempting to stop looking at the code at all (but don't do this in prod!). The model still has quirks that people will run into and the safeguards are configured to be a little too trigger happy for launch, which can hopefully be tuned over time.
I feel a lot of things changing as working software increasingly comes out on a tap. The Jevon's paradox kicks in and I feel my own demand for software growing substantially. You can ask for anything - explainers, visualizers, dashboards, bespoke single-use apps (e.g. a full wandb that is hyper-specific just for your project), you can 10X your test suite, auto-optimize code, run giant research projects with custom HTML for the results, anything! "Free your mind" (Matrix ref). Really looking forward to all the things people build!
Great post on FDEs. Everyone should read it if you’re interested in this job category. This is a job that is going to be around as long as AI keeps changing rapidly, which it inevitably will.
People often wonder why isn’t this like just deploying other forms of technology in the past, like cloud.
Because something like cloud adoption affected a fairly concentrated set of users (developers and IT), and generally didn’t require a fundamental change to the workflows of employees to get the benefits of the new service being delivered on the cloud. At best you went to one training session and you were done.
With agents, the work to implement them is not only highly technical, but they directly impact the underlying workflows that people participate in. This means there’s a ton of technical work and change management that comes with it.
Further, the pace of change of cloud wasn’t nearly as quick, so there was a lot more time for best practices to propagate. Now, every model change means either something new can be done that wasn’t possible before, or some piece of scaffolding is now redundant or holding you back.
This is why it’s commonly easier for a vendor or partner that’s seen the implementation hundreds or thousands of times help do the work, even with internal support from the customer.
So, this job isn’t going away any time soon, and will be a great path for a lot of technical talent, especially early career.
People talk, listen, watch, think, and collaborate at the same time, in real time. We've designed an AI that works with people the same way.
We share our approach, early results, and a quick look at our model in action.
https://t.co/AFJZ5kH7Ku
The race for LLM "cognitive core" - a few billion param model that maximally sacrifices encyclopedic knowledge for capability. It lives always-on and by default on every computer as the kernel of LLM personal computing.
Its features are slowly crystalizing:
- Natively multimodal text/vision/audio at both input and output.
- Matryoshka-style architecture allowing a dial of capability up and down at test time.
- Reasoning, also with a dial. (system 2)
- Aggressively tool-using.
- On-device finetuning LoRA slots for test-time training, personalization and customization.
- Delegates and double checks just the right parts with the oracles in the cloud if internet is available.
It doesn't know that William the Conqueror's reign ended in September 9 1087, but it vaguely recognizes the name and can look up the date. It can't recite the SHA-256 of empty string as e3b0c442..., but it can calculate it quickly should you really want it.
What LLM personal computing lacks in broad world knowledge and top tier problem-solving capability it will make up in super low interaction latency (especially as multimodal matures), direct / private access to data and state, offline continuity, sovereignty ("not your weights not your brain"). i.e. many of the same reasons we like, use and buy personal computers instead of having thin clients access a cloud via remote desktop or so.
AI PROMPTING → AI VERIFYING
AI prompting scales, because prompting is just typing.
But AI verifying doesn’t scale, because verifying AI output involves much more than just typing.
Sometimes you can verify by eye, which is why AI is great for frontend, images, and video. But for anything subtle, you need to read the code or text deeply — and that means knowing the topic well enough to correct the AI.
Researchers are well aware of this, which is why there’s so much work on evals and hallucination.
However, the concept of verification as the bottleneck for AI users is under-discussed. Yes, you can try formal verification, or critic models where one AI checks another, or other techniques. But to even be aware of the issue as a first class problem is half the battle.
For users: AI verifying is as important as AI prompting.