Will Piot retweeted
It’s almost incomprehensible how wide the distance is between someone who’s working at the frontier with AI and basically everyone else right now.
The crazy thing is these lines are not converging, but only growing farther apart. If the curve of AI progress had leveled off, it would certainly have given most people and companies time to catch up or implement their workflows in a standardized way. The technology would have neutralized competitive advantage because everyone would be using it the same way.
But what’s happened is the opposite. The curve of AI progress is basically going vertical right now, which means if you had codified your processes 3-6 months ago you’re likely already behind again. Now imagine most companies that kicked into gear a year ago and thought that they were done. Even further behind now.
I’ve never seen a technology in my life and career that improves at this rate, which consequently means you need to upgrade your expectations at a similar rate. Our brains weren’t wired for this, and our organizational change management processes certainly weren’t either.
With any form of recursive self improvement, things just get wilder. It’s a time when you will need to be constantly reevaluating the things that didn’t work just a couple months ago to see if they now can be solved. AI native companies certainly have a strong advantage due to this right now, so now it comes down to can the bigger companies keep up. Wild times.
Will Piot retweeted
If your company refers to engineers as the IT department, you have nothing to worry about. You were already breached last week.
Will Piot retweeted
Marc Andreessen says the gap between what AI-native startups and incumbents think AI can do is the widest he’s ever seen:
"The AI-native early stage startups have just a completely different view on what they can do with AI than the typical incumbents in almost any industry, almost without exception."
"AI is just racing ahead in capability even week by week... There are going to be a lot of industries that are really up for grabs in a fundamentally more profound way than maybe has been the case in the past."
"The founders are gonna have a level of superpowers coming from the use of these tools and these technologies that they just simply haven't had in the past... Had I had Astra and Netscape in 1994, like, oh my God. Like, Ben, what would you and I have been able to do at Netscape?"
"Those entrepreneurs are gonna color way outside the lines. We already see this. They're not gonna think of themselves as like, 'I'm just a software company,' or, 'I'm just a hardware company,' or even, 'I'm just an AI company.'"
@pmarca @bhorowitz
Today, a16z Crypto is becoming a16z Frontier.
Since joining a16z in 2013, @cdixon has focused on technologies that look futuristic well before they reach the mainstream. Those themes led to investments in Oculus, Skydio, Zipline, Coinbase, Solana, and Uniswap.
Frontier expands that mandate beyond crypto to back "outer planet" founders who are building new technologies and creating markets that may take years to develop.
Chris joins @pmarca, @bhorowitz, and @eriktorenberg to discuss why crypto has become part of the broader tech landscape, why Frontier fills a hole in the firm's architecture, and why they'd rather be too early than too late.
They also get into why the gap between AI-native startups and incumbents is the widest Marc has ever seen, how AI could pull forward 20 years of frontier technology, why stablecoins may become the way AI agents pay each other, how AI is breaking the internet's business model, and why today's 18-year-olds are about to become superhumans.
0:50 Introducing a16z Frontier
2:49 Smartphone parts to drones and VR
4:47 Backing the "outer planets"
7:11 Good ideas that look like bad ideas
10:43 The JP Morgan photo in Marc's office
15:13 Good tech ideas eventually work
16:53 AI may pull tech 20 years forward
18:18 The widest AI gap Marc's ever seen
22:06 Workers adopt AI before companies do
26:32 Old use cases vs. AI-native ones
30:08 Beyond "product manager brain"
34:45 AI can reverse engineer any hardware
38:23 The case for open source AI
46:36 How AI breaks the internet's model
49:11 VR, homebrew hacking, multiplayer AI
54:00 If you're 18, study "modern alchemy"
YouTube: youtu.be/-9XQMHhpypc
Not an offer or solicitation. None of the information herein should be taken as investment advice; Some of the companies mentioned are portfolio companies of a16z. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more information. A list of investments made by a16z is available at a16z.com/portfolio.
Will Piot retweeted
Sometimes a demo is simply to remind the world that your competition has no desire to dream -- and no ability to evolve.
Will Piot retweeted
Every social surface on the internet is in a state of constant entropy. Its default state is to decay and turn into slop. The only way a public space can endure is to be fighting tooth-and-nail every hour for its survival.
Will Piot retweeted
it’s clear we need to retire the term vibe coding because the models now produce better architecture & way more coherent code than an average software engineer.
perhaps even better than top software engineers too because unlike a human, ai has a much much larger context window.
this ain’t vibe coding at all. it’s precision engineering.
Will Piot retweeted
The AI gap in 4 lines
> 6B people never touched it
> 1-2B think its a better Google
> 20M let agents do weeks of work in one prompt
> a few thousand are already using whats next
Everyone saying AI is overhyped and everyone saying its moving insanely fast are both right, just about different "floors".
And the gap between those floors is only getting wider.
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.
Will Piot retweeted
Epic Games has internally delayed the release of a shooter game they’ve been developing featuring Star Wars & Marvel characters.
• Developers on the game have now been told to only use AI to write the code — “No more hand-written code”
• All art for the game would be “generated with full AI workflows”
(Source: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…)
Will Piot retweeted
OpenAI is downplaying this for PR reasons. If you’re a mathematician, you must feel like a nuclear bomb hit, and you’re at ground zero.
Reasoning models are two years-old. In that time they went from incapable of basic arithmetic to solving problems humans couldn’t solve for decades.
Math is only the beginning. AI will revolutionize the entirety of the human scientific endeavor. Most of us don’t appreciate what that means.
What a time to be alive!
We’re releasing a broad range of new mathematical results produced by an internal frontier model.
We’ve been consulting with the independent Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence at the Institute for Advanced Study, and we have drawn on their advice and public recommendations to inform how we release these results.
github.com/openai/math
Will Piot retweeted
The X Safety team conducted an investigation into suspected Chinese inauthentic accounts involved in influence operations:
We identified a bot farm of approximately 200,000 accounts. Within this farm, we found 200 accounts posting in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy.
These posts contained claims that AI data centers are driving up household electricity prices and straining the grid. Others included AI-generated cartoons that depicted data-center operators enriching themselves at the public's expense.
We remain committed to maintaining an open and authentic platform where people debate topics of public interest. We take seriously any attempts to undermine the integrity of the global town square and suspend accounts that violate our Authenticity policy.
Will Piot retweeted
Homer had a lyre. You have Grok Imagine.
Create a compelling scene from Homer’s The Odyssey that shows what Grok @Imagine’s video and voice capabilities can do. We’re awarding $100K, $50K, and $25K to the top three videos submitted by quoting this post. 🧵
Will Piot retweeted
How to increase well-being:
– Good days aren't built on big events; they're a string of small positive moments
– Treat every interaction as an opportunity to connect
– Share any kind compliment the second you think it; don't hold back out of social anxiety
– Acting more extroverted (even if you're not) measurably increases positive affect
– Over 2 weeks of increased social connection, well-being rises across the entire introvert-to-extrovert scale (Lyubomirsky, UC Riverside)
– Think of connection like exercise: you don't have to, but you'll feel better if you do it more
Nicholas Epley on @hubermanlab
Will Piot retweeted
The pace of progress is more important than any single release and Grok is improving quickly. Well done, @spacexai.
Will Piot retweeted
Grok 4.6 is roughly the same performance as Fable 5 Max at an 85% discount. 80% cheaper for input tokens and 88% cheaper for output tokens.
Pareto dominant.
Grok 4.7 will be significantly better as is a much larger model with the Cursor and SpaceX data included in pretraining.
