
Founder of @bromleymindfulness and @meditationclass
London, England
Joined October 2007
- Tweets234
- Following241
- Followers281
- Likes18.6K
This!
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.
Robert Mitchell retweeted
If you have a problem with what is happening to our society, manifested by a small but loud number of activists… yet you say nothing! Do not complain when all common sense, logic, respect, civility, debate, small businesses, free speech & womens rights are gone!
The hysteria about AI #watermarking is hilarious. All these people that want to pass off AI text as theirs.
1. If it's your writing why would you care?
2. If it's AI generated what's wrong with stating that?
Surely text/copy stands on its own irrespective of the source.
The improvement of my performance by using AI is directly proportional to the learning curve of the technology or skill I'm using it for.
That isn't how complex it is.
It's how unintuitive it is.
To this “to be blunt, work that we would usually do with people with masters and PhDs in finance over the course of weeks or months being done by AI agents over the course of hours or days.”
From this 🧵👇
A big pivot from Ken Griffin on AI:
“Number one is, in the last few months, there has been a step change in the productivity of the AI toolkit. It is profoundly more powerful than it was just nine months ago.
And for us at Citadel, that has allowed us to unleash a much broader array of use cases for AI. And it has been really interesting to watch, to be blunt, work that we would usually do with people with masters and PhDs in finance over the course of weeks or months being done by AI agents over the course of hours or days.
These are not these are not mid-tier white collar jobs. These are like extraordinarily high skilled jobs being, I'm going to pick a word, automated by agentic AI. And I gotta tell you, I went home one Friday actually fairly depressed by this because you could just see how this was going to have such a dramatic impact on society.
When you witness it in your own four walls, when you see work that used to be man years of work being done in days or weeks, it's like, wow, like that's the first time I've seen real impact in our four walls.”
This echoes my own experience with agents and the conversations I am having with students, friends & clients. The toolkit has dramatically transformed and it feels like in finance, for the first time, AI is real.
Three months ago the same guy was telling the WEF about “AI garbage workslop”
xitter.cf/FundamentEdge/status/2…
To contrast, this is what Ken said just 3 months ago at WEF:
“There was a recent Harvard paper on this they called it AI work slop — that it looks good but if you sort of peel back the onion, the substance isn't there. I was with one of my colleagues who runs our commodities business, and they handed a report on that we were generating with an AI engine. Doesn't matter what the topic was, the first few sentences — wow, that's really insightful — and then you go down below that and it's all garbage.”
What's the collective noun for AI agents?
Having mulled this over for at least a few moments, I like the idea of " a fleet of agents". Swarm seems too messy for me. My agents are far more ordered than that.
Hey @AnthropicAI Whoever suggested the /btw flag on claude code is a genius
I’ve just muted the word insane from my timeline - the thought of receiving yet another clickbait post saying “App X has just dropped function Y which gives you insane Z” is just too much for me 🙄
I just read the @claudeai skills docs.
I realised I now needed an infinitely growing library of projects and context to guide Claude in the processes I have planned, but Claude skills have solved that in as elegant a manner as I could have hoped for.
Rock on @AnthropicAI!
Replying to @TalkTalk
So then, the only way to get to a human being is to masquerade as a billing issue and I’m put through to someone in India.
I explain my friend is unwell, alone, vulnerable, has no other way of connecting and has no broadband.
They put the phone down on us..
So that’s my experience of #TalkTalk customer service just in case you’re thinking of signing up.
This week I am working with a couple of local community organisations. On Tuesday I'm at the #HayesWickPCN Connected Living Cafe.
The Hayes Wick PCN Connected Living Cafe initiative provides a chance for patients to meet in a relaxed and friendly environment, providing them with digital support around using the NHS App and accessing their GP, as well as educational talks from local agencies which will improve the health and wellbeing of our patient population.
On Thursday, I am running a workshop for #MadlaniCancerSupport.
Madlani Cancer Support was founded by Dinta, Louise and Katie who came together through a shared experience of Breast Cancer. Madlani Cancer Support combines holistic support, community groups and complementary therapies online and in person to their service users.
Come along and join us at either of these events, or pass on the info to any friends and family that could benefit.
We all want to be part of something greater than ourselves that can give us purpose and meaning, joy and happiness. This is how we express our humanity and reconnect to the natural world.
This week we shall explore Connection, Separation and Integration.
🌟 Learn more and take a step back from our increasingly crazy world. ✨
10 am at Bromley Common Methodist Church, Bloomfield Road, Bromley BR2 9RZ.
- Free parking on adjacent roads 🚗
- No need to book - drop in 🚪
- Newcomers and beginners welcome 🙋♀️🙋♂️
- The classes cost £15, you can pay on arrival 💰
- Ten passes are £120 💷
#Mindfulness #Wellbeing #Meditation #GuidedMeditation
#Bromley
#Compassion
#Connection
#Community
Check out a little bit of code I wrote to simplify my training offerings. Ping me if you would like one too.
Hi everyone,
I have a little Christmas present for you.
As you may have noticed, I've been pretty much offline for the last week or two.
I've been doing two things which I have had requests for from my Students.
1. A single place online with links to all my training. I realise that all the different options can be confusing. I now have all the online and in-person courses, classes, retreats, workshops, and video and audio channels in one place.
2. A place where you can go and press a calm button to listen to calming meditations at the click of a button.
You can find both here at:
meditationhub.app
I don't normally suggest that people share my links, but I think we will all know someone who can benefit from calmness over Christmas. 😉
Until Google gets to know me, you may need to forward them the link. At the moment, in Google, typing in the link doesn't take you to this site.
Have a wonderful, relaxing and calming Christmas and New Year,
Robert
Robert Mitchell retweeted
Six ways to fill Labour’s fiscal “black hole” youtu.be/eo-cgUtD9Lw?si=mm7U… Labour claims it has a “black hole” of £22 billion to fill in the government’s finances. They should stop making a fuss. Doing so would be easy. There are at least six – and maybe more – ways to do it.
Robert Mitchell retweeted
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman says it won't be until GPT-6 in 2 years time that AI models will be able to follow instructions and take consistent action
Robert Mitchell retweeted
Free Webinar: New Year - New Mindset - Start The Year With Meditation and Connection
Hi everyone,
I hope that you had an enjoyable, calming and relaxing Christmas. This is just a quick note to remind you that I'm running a webinar at 7pm tonight.
The focus of the session is on new skills for the new year. The webinar will run for just under an hour. I'll explain the enhancements that I've made to The Energy Tree Meditation framework. Then we will practice some meditations for 30 or 40 minutes follow by any questions.
So join us at 7pm on Zoom.
Click below to register in advance:
us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regi… – at Bromley, London











