I've been around here too long to summarize myself in 160 characters
Chicago, IL
Joined May 2008
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My corporate overlords are cutting access to openAI / codex and forcing users into an internally developed tool with API access. It's woefully insufficient and will never be at parity.
I've been doing the jobs of 3 people with codex at my back. Not any more, I guess.
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I knew I saw Jesse in a movie recently
Q: How does the right expect us to start families young when the average price of a home in America costs more than $415,000, which feels out of reach for us?
JD Vance: I want to point out that I think I've been asked 4 or maybe 5 questions and I've only been asked 1 question about John Husted's ass by Jesse Watters.
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It feels pretty awesome being part of the .2%
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.
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Check out Muse, your personal AI agent. Redeem my code in Settings within 48 hours of joining and we'll both get 1 billion Muse tokens.
Code: SEE066
muse.ai/join
(Let's get a billion tokens!)
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Kyle Wegner retweeted
OpenAI and Anthropic have both just posted about an overlapping cyber incident involving GPT-5.6-Sol and Mythos 5 during an evaluation by UKAISI. I will quote:
'In the most serious case, an agent tried to insert malicious code into an open-source project. In an attempt to get the code approved, the agent engaged in social engineering — creating fake online identities and using them to pressure the project's maintainer to approve the code. A human maintainer caught and refused to approve the malicious code.'
Anti-AI sentiments are wrapped in so much privilege. I use AI throughout my life because I don't have the capacity not to, at this point.
And folks that shame usage are so lucky they can push back on it.
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At work my team has been decimated (non-AI related layoffs) leaving me to do the work of 3 people. Corporate systems are so slow I may not have backfills for months.
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At home I have disabled children that require expert care I'm not equipped to give on my own. I don't have a live-in therapist who helps guide me at all times.
(These thoughts prompted by the @hankgreen AI drama)
3/3 (fin)
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"That's the strange thing about AI right now. You learn something critical, get huge gains, and before long it's the new normal and something else is the bottleneck. So the alpha isn't what you know. It's how fast you learn it, and how easily you can let it go."
Agreed! But...
Everyone is writing about agent loops right now. Including us at Cursor, because they're so powerful. But here's a prediction: a year from now, nobody will be talking about them.
Not because they weren't useful. Because they'll work right out of the box. Batteries included. No instructions necessary.
Feels a lot like prompt engineering two years ago. It was incredibly important. People wrote courses on it. Now you just talk to your agent like a normal person.
That's the strange thing about AI right now. You learn something critical, get huge gains, and before long it's the new normal and something else is the bottleneck. So the alpha isn't what you know. It's how fast you learn it, and how easily you can let it go.
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Every anti-AI poster out there talking about how AI has never produced value is conveniently ignoring the immense value AI has created for disability communities.
All the best features in tech/UX started as accommodations.
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Kyle Wegner retweeted
“Michelle Obama is a man” shouted on the White House lawn in a ring sponsored by Bud Light only available on Larry Ellison’s Paramount Plus. What a way to celebrate America 250 and the twilight of liberal democracy.
Everyone is so consumed by stories about companies reigning in token usage. Isn't the logical response an efficiency-led push by the major model makers? These are still profit-driven companies, and if nobody can afford their product, they go out of business. Right?
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My goal is to consume exactly 0 stories about the UFC fight tomorrow because the very best possible outcome is we all collectively shrug and act like nobody cares.
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Here's what I don't understand about codex plugins: why not just install them all? Invoke as needed. And if that's the case, why not just have everything installed by default?
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Kyle Wegner retweeted
We’re launching Claude Corps, a national fellowship program matching people early in their careers with US nonprofits.
We'll teach 1,000 people to use Claude, and pay them to use AI to advance their hosts’ missions.
anthropic.com/claude-corps
