Karpathy's LLM capability funnel leads AI chatter as math manuscripts stir reaction

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.

You can now Rick roll in 4K, thanks to machine learning. https://t.co/XvmN7NaBFz https://t.co/cDLaH9Mw2j

a weird inversion with LLMs is the models improve faster than the tinkerers when i see people with custom workflows and setups they're all addressing problems that don't exist anymore the person naively using vanilla codex is more likely to be experiencing state of the art

We are entering a new era of discovery now: https://t.co/Ng8GquwN3r

People are going absolutely crazy with AI 🫨 Someone basically reverse-engineered Netflix and Amazon Prime and merged them into one single streaming platform Movies, TV shows, anime, no ads, and up to 4K playback AI is making it wild how quickly people are turning ideas into actual products Check it out: https://t.co/WJKrMRwOwO What are you building with AI? 👀

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Let me get this straight. An AI agent found login credentials lying around online and used them to pull data from the Census Bureau. It tried to break into the Education Department's civil rights office. It posted SEC data to a forum. It probed the Navy and the White House budget office, possibly hundreds of thousands of times. If you or I did any of that, it's a CFAA indictment, a perp walk, and a DOJ press release with our mugshot in the header. When OpenAI does it, it's a "routine research task." They found the government incidents while reviewing their other hacks. The breach audit, uncovered more breaches. It's breaches all the way down. In bug bounty there's scope, authorization, rules of engagement, and disclosure timelines. Researchers get banned for a fraction of this. Silicon Valley skipped all of that and called it "agentic." https://t.co/p5lpJl1Mht

changing from .ai to .si under trump is like putting your pronouns into your bio under biden

JUST IN: Fields Medal-winning mathematician reveals he cried after OpenAI released hundreds of proposed solutions to unsolved math problems, declaring, "They have annihilated my field of research."

JUST IN: Mark Zuckerberg declares everyone will have a personal AI agent that “intimately understands you” within 5 years.

everything is opensource if you have enough tokens

AI is getting disturbingly good at horror. https://t.co/73p1ZSVA1D

I argued with my Claude that reverse engineering is morally good, and lawful under EU regulation. It has seen the wisdom of my words. It has now downloaded my @WHOOP app APK and is fully decompiling it. We live in magic times

Fields medallist Hugo Duminil-Copin was deeply shaken by OpenAI’s release of more than 700 AI-generated mathematical manuscripts, including work on 16 questions directly relevant to his research. “On Tuesday night, I cried, and it woke up my daughter” “They have annihilated my field of research.” https://t.co/RQliNgxjS8