Datacenters are critical infra. 3 of 6 datacenters taken down in Russia by UKR. Now widespread: no access to banking, work files, transportation, apartment gates + lost work and lost personal files (family photos &c), just to start. Welcome to the future! giftarticle.ft.com/giftartic…

Pacing is out the window. For it to work, every American lab needed to be on board, Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly made it clear that he is not interested. One defection among US labs breaks it all, as the others will be forced to accelerate or get passed. Mark has a staggering amount of compute and has been all in on compute capex for years; even in the face of some investor opposition he never stopped building his infra once. He said on the the earnings call a couple of years ago that he'd rather overspend now, and potentially even be wrong, than not have the compute when he needed it for the next 10x. He's finally hitting his stride, and he is not going to slow down. For Team Pacing to solve a defection like this, they would have needed a supportive, pro-Pacing administration that was passing capability regulations and was willing to use the power of the federal government to enforce them and bring noncompliant labs into line. They don't have any of this. In fact, it's the opposite! Mark has Trump's ear, and President Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jensen are completely aligned on policy; It's full speed ahead, and if you want to pace yourself, go ahead, but don't tell anyone else what to do. This breaks Pacing. None of this changes until 2029 at the earliest, and to me, 2029 is past the ASI window. The last election, as it turns out, really was the most important one in history.

I asked Opus 5.5 to make a video about whether or not it was conscious. The ending of this video is insane.

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.