AI认知差距扩大形成漏斗

Andrej Karpathy 说，人们对 AI 能力的理解差距在扩大，这种认知差距正在变成一个漏斗。 约 60 亿人几乎没接触过大模型；10 亿到 20 亿人偶尔用免费版 ChatGPT 查东西、写东西，觉得用处不大，很多数学和编程以外的专业人士也在这一层，对 AI 的进步只是道理上懂。 约 2000 万人（Karpathy 按 0.2% 估算的，我觉得偏高，至少除以 10）在编程和数学里重度使用最前沿的模型，亲眼看着要做几周、几个月的项目，一段提示词发给 Agent 几天就能做完；还有约 5000 人能在公司内部用上更强的系统。 差距主要有三个原因： 一是问题够不够大，一段话就能答完的问题用不到 AI 的真本事。 二是能力只在部分领域冒尖：编程和数学的结果能自动验证，比如代码测试通没通过，模型很适合用强化学习（做对了就给奖励）来练，这类能力卖给企业又最赚钱，厂商投入最多；文章写得好不好很难判定，进步就慢。 三是能用到哪一档，免费版、付费版、内部版看到的东西差别很大。 所以，如果你只偶尔问问免费的聊天机器人，看到的离最前沿差了好几层；如果你主要拿 AI 写东西、查资料，觉得这一年没怎么进步，这个感觉也没错。 Andrej Karpathy @karpathy 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. 🔗 View Quoted Tweet 💬 9 🔄 0 ❤️ 23 👀 2723 📊 10 ⚡