The Normie Frontier

2026 October 03

The general public is not up to date on general AI capabilities. Why? For them to understand what is happening, you can't think of the Navier-Stokes equations. It is too abstract; in fact, you have to understand that, for the public consciousness, the cheapest / worst product is what people think AI is.

Suddenly AI music is really good. I was listening to the Suno v6 model songs and I had to stop some tracks; it is so fucking good. I don’t think we are used to hearing music this good from an AI. I simply had not been catching up with AI music. But across the board, we are seeing improvements. We have better and more capable models across the board in video, music, and text.

But why didn't I know about this? Well, because the viral AI songs are using what is cheapest and easiest to produce. The slop content farms go for the lowest common denominator. But the general population won’t know the true frontier because it is not "easily accessible"[^1].

It is the same issue with why most of my friends who are not really online tend to use claude over chatgpt because they think that claude (free) is smarter than chatgpt (free), and in fact, it is true! One uses a bigger model than the other one, Luna vs. Sonnet. But the average person doesn’t really understand what the size of a model even is! To them, both models are just details, and they are just talking to "AI".

To me and a lot of people, AI decompilation of video games has done more to advance the normie frontier than a Millennium Prize Problem being solved. Remember, the general public is still arguing about stochastic parrots![^2]

What these labs and everyone in tech need to understand is that you are normally not judged by the best output you can create, but by the WORST one. By the obvious AI. That is what the normie frontier is defined by.[^3]

The definition of the normie frontier is:

your most accessible offering to the greatest number of people.

In my opinion, that is why Instinct feels so cool to people. It's because it is easy enough to use, and it's WAY better than any of the current free offerings that exist.

So if you want to make people understand what is happening with AI, I think the best thing you can do is just show them current outputs! Show them the "gated" content.

[^1]: Suno is free, but you still have to put in some sort of effort to create an account.

[^2]: It doesn't matter!

[^3]: So if I was someone like Elon, it makes sense to give Grok away because it is really "smart" compared to other free offerings.

[^4]: AI was used to fix typos. I don't really use a word processor so it's easier just to make a model find all my mistakes.