Regarding the frontier models, there’s a idea called Karpathy’s Funnel which notes the massive difference in experience with AI models. It funnels the population of the world like this: (borrowing a lot from a Karpathy tweet with some paraphrasing)
6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs.
1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and AI slop, to this part of the world the whole thing feels crazy still.
20M people (0.2%) see frontier-grade LLMs, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. You typically need a budget to get this experience. There are multiple levels in this tier as well from those that use ‘open-weight’ models to expensive monsters like Claude Fable. Models are Powerful tools at this level.
5k People (~0.00006%) have access to frontier-grade systems internally inside AI labs, they have the budget to put the frontier on automatic, spin up hundreds of agents, and burn their huge salary’s worth in tokens.
At these lower tiers of the funnel, they believe in the future the AI companies promise because they’ve literally bought in enough to actually get the experience.
Regarding the frontier models, there’s a idea called Karpathy’s Funnel which notes the massive difference in experience with AI models. It funnels the population of the world like this: (borrowing a lot from a Karpathy tweet with some paraphrasing)
At these lower tiers of the funnel, they believe in the future the AI companies promise because they’ve literally bought in enough to actually get the experience.