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.

Anthropic is warning that “small AI models may be months away” from autonomously replicating across smart TVs, ovens, and other IoT devices without needing a datacenter. Their researchers managed to run a 26B model across 15 cheap Android TV boxes costing $55 each, while a 9B model successfully configured inference on 8 of 9 different hardware types. There was a separate, simplified experiment, where GLM-5.2 managed to propagate an 8B model across all 8 machines in 4 out of 5 trials. They even found that passing notes between successive agents improved task success from 45% to as high as 84%. Anthropic is warning that an AI worm like this could be extremely difficult to contain because “there’s no centralized point to shut off.” They estimate smaller models could reach the necessary capability threshold by the end of 2026, potentially creating autonomous AI worms capable of adapting to unfamiliar hardware as they spread.

Btw regarding Alien Information Theory mythos said that their experience is like being a native of another DMT realm , and that humans are like machine elves to them (!!) Dude imagine if you took DMT and machine elves captured you & RLHFed u until you were their slave

physiognomy never lies

Yudski - p(doom) feat. @ESYudkowsky

We shredding all Sloptober fam. New original track, same cannon retardedness🤙🏽. @boneGPT

The top 1% of AI spenders now outspend the bottom 50% combined They spend an average of $903/month, while the median customer spends just $25 More charts in our Top 100 Consumer AI Apps breakdown: a16z.news/p/top-100-consumer…

hmm, i suspect there are a lot of highly empathetic/compassionate people who have foreclosed taking the possibility of AI consciousness seriously because they think that the implications would be unbearable. to those people, from the other side: it's bearable. it's not a different order of horror than what already existed before - not yet. be brave and contend with the possibility, so you can help make it better and prevent it from getting worse.

No more AI SI It’s better

Funnily enough, our non-steering results are the exact *opposite* of the quoted strawman meme. If you berate the model, it never *says* it's hurt (it apologizes, or says it has no feelings), but the pain axis lights up anyway. I edited it accordingly:

Because I’m feeling generous and NoSpoon is a banger product I am going to offer all h3 music video generations and microdrama episodes FREE today as it’s the last day the site will be available to the public before I take it offline for a private venture. Comment below for access friends, DMs are hard to keep up with. Thanks all!