Rule-based work isn't a career anymore. It's a prompt. In every rule-based profession, humans are now the slow, expensive, error-prone option. Claude Opus 5 got 20 for 20 at 100% and wrapped each task in minutes, while 12 licensed CPAs landed anywhere from 0% to about 90%, with several running out the 3-hour clock.

Blackstone President and COO Jon Gray made this same point few months back. Any rule-based businesses, like accounting, legal, finance, will be completely disrupted by AI. 🎯 e.g. JPMorgan dropped proxy advisors for shareholder votes, replacing them with AI. https://x.com/BloombergTV/status/2016932349737410876/video/1

“We find that on medium-length, well-defined accounting tasks, frontier AI models are now faster and more accurate than junior accountants, even the best one in our study.” Eighteen months ago they scored well below human accountants Good discussion here: https://www.mercor.com/blog/human-baselines-for-benchmarks-ai-now-outperforms-junior-accountants/

'More striking is how fast AI took the lead. Just eighteen months ago, the best AI models fell short of the average accountant’s ~37% score. Today, models ace those same tasks.' 'These results are provocative. So much so that we considered not publishing them for fear of misinterpretation. But we think transparency about the findings matters as people and institutions prepare for rapidly advancing AI.'

So this is the part I did not expect. Anthropic called Swami Sarvapriyananda, a Vedanta monk and flew him to the San Francisco head-office. > Closed door meeting with NDA signed. > theologians and mental health people in the same sitting, all of it aimed at training Claude. > and one of the founders stayed in the room the whole time. ---- From 'Ramakrishna Vedanta Society of North Texas" YT channel (full video link in comment)

We'll be spending a lot more time trying to understand the outputs of language models. A few thoughts, tips & tricks: Writing. Something I've had success with: Ask your LLM to explain something in ASD-STE100, it's a controlled language specification originally developed for aerospace maintenance documentation. LLMs well-versed in this language and it comes with heavy constraints on clean writing style that I often find a lot more readable. Sometimes I've tried to soften it a bit e.g. ask for "80% of the way to ASD-STE100" because the spec is quite stringent. But even better: Diagrams / images. Instead of writing, ask your LLM to create a diagram. These can be a lot easier to process, parse, and understand. But even better: Web pages. Ask for output "in HTML" to get a beautiful, interactive webpage. LLMs are getting really good at frontend and can create beautiful experiences, animations, etc. But even better: Explainer videos. The output format I am most bullish on is fully custom / bespoke explainer videos generated on any arbitrary topic. Experiment with things like "Create a 3b1b style video explainer on X. Use my ElevenLabs API key for audio narration". (you'd need an API key for the latter or you can ask your LLM to find you decent free alternatives that use your local compute). This is actually starting to work! In summary: - As LLMs get better, they will do more and more of the legwork autonomously, and a lot more of our work will rise up the abstractions into oversight and understanding. - Luckily, LLMs can help here too because as intelligence and code are increasingly abundant, you can ask for large, custom, discardable software artifacts (e.g. web apps, video explainers) that would have never made sense to create before. Push the boundaries here and you'll be surprised.

Excited to announce Volantis's $88M Series A. We are solving Al's memory bottleneck by using optics, enabling chips with huge amounts of fast & cheap memory. By boosting both the memory bandwidth and capacity per chip by orders of magnitude, we enable ultra-fast inference (up to 10,000 tps/user) for large models (>10T) - with low $/tok to boot. Initially, this will enable insanely fast agents - think coding agents that finish in minutes or even seconds instead of hours. More excitingly, optics is a fundamentally scalable way to increase memory systems. Not 2X/year, but by orders of magnitude across new generations. This will enable a structurally new Al industry, including restarting scaling laws, holding entire repos in context windows & more. Our team has pioneered many core semiconductor technologies: the 1st CoWoS product, early HBM, the 1st silicon photonics CPO systems, the 1st high volume tunable VCSELs, the 1st processors to directly communicate using light & more. We’ve already sent data >10× farther than equally tiny electrical wires inside a chip package. Our next iteration is already taped out and targets world-record bandwidth density over relevant distances, read more: https://volantissemi.ai/news-insights/our-88m-series-a-demolishing-the-memory-wall-with-photonics-post

Eric Schmidt: If I could invest in only 1 AI theme, it would be long reasoning. A model that can stay on 1 problem for hours/days is a completely different thing from a model that answers and stops, and most people still have not priced that difference. ---- From "Blackstone and Eric Schmidt" YouTube channel, (link in comment)