mr. TIM

@timkellogg.me

AI Architect | North Carolina | AI/ML, IoT, science WARNING: I talk about kids sometimes

@timkellogg.me

the funnel - 80% of the world has no AI contact - ~20% have janky experience - 0.2% are power users - 0.00006% work for labs and have internal access to actual frontier models

Andrej Karpathy @karpathy .27m 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 OpenAl-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.
@timkellogg.me

most people under 40 have probably never heard someone say, “let’s synchronize our watches” most clocks that we use are within milliseconds of an atomic clock the best technological advances are basically invisible

@timkellogg.me

there’s a theory that AI explosion will cause broad wealth, and if you look at what recently-wealthy people, their spending habits change to consume more services and experiential things e.g. snoop dogg hires his own personal blunt roller so maybe we all just shift to services & be human-centric

@timkellogg.me

practically speaking, it’s stuff like when your working through an edge case and you’ve found a problem, in program agents you can send a message to an agent to investigate (in SaaS, that’s the role of alarms)

@timkellogg.me

think about devops & ops teams in SaaS bluesky is just software, but when something goes down, it’s not *just* software that brings it back up. so SaaS is just software where humans occupy various roles in the product and program agents are the same, but human=> AI

@timkellogg.me

imo most AI will eventually become something like these program agents you probably won’t interact with AI all that much, at least not that directly. But AI will permeate everything regardless it’ll all be just regular software, that self-heals, and adapts to whatever is needed

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