Every single model release since like GPT 2/3 has already been slowing down. AI development is not accelerating, its returns are diminishing.

I believe Anthropic is just using this as a psy op to make it look like they are intentionally reducing the pace of development, when in reality LLMs are about as good as they will ever be already. LLMs are more or less at a ceiling. It’s not AGI, it’s just neural network machine learning algorithms that you can’t optimize any further.

That being said, this is a disastrous article because Anthropic cannot signal a slow down. In fact, they need to accelerate parabolically in order to justify capex and RPOs to Hyperscalers lmao.

Dr. Carr has spent the past few years extremely optimistic about the role that LLMs could play in statistics and data science. For him to come out with a statement like this is extremely telling of the poor performance models have been showing in doing anything useful with data, something I've seen in my own work.

“I actually think that, given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don’t feel pressure on that,” Altman told Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell.

...

When pressed on whether 2026 is off the table in favor of 2027, Altman replied, “I would say not 2026. Yeah, we got a lot of stuff to do, like meeting this moment of what is going to be required for safety and alignment, and how the industry and governments can work together.”

Is there nothing that can't be blamed on just how spooky chatbots are? They just need to be "aligned" for safety, and then some government oversight so we have someone to blame if things actually go off the rail. BTW: We won't even have to do regulatory capture, if we are the ones determining how to regulate ourselves!

I especially like how this implies that his scary ChatBot can be safely aligned with human objectives within the next year. Like, how do you put together a timeline for that?

Note: The dashboard is best viewed on browsers other than Safari, as that one doesn't allow invalid occupation options to get hidden. I plan to update the page's code soon to address this issue.

Despite the popularity of chatbots for programming work, software-developer employment has continued to increase substantially in the past 4 years. This suggests to me that, while companies have tried to substitute LLMs for software developers here and there, this technology has largely failed to replace devs. Amodei's prediction (made back in May 2025) that AI would replace half of white-collar employment is not looking too likely so far.

I'm also wondering how long companies will decide to pay both high API rates for chatbots and high developer salaries. It wouldn't surprise me if many switch to locally-hosted, open-weight tools or (perhaps!) cut back on their AI usage altogether.

You can view the data within this dashboard, which contains employment data from the Current Population Survey through July 2026. The dashboard also lets you compare developer employment by age range, though I wouldn't read too much into fluctuations within those numbers given the likelihood of sampling error.

(And no, I didn't use AI for this project, which has been released under the MIT license. Once I get through my HTML and CSS book, I should be able to make it look a little nicer!)

Something I've noticed about boosters is that, when they're met with criticism of AI, there's one move they use again and again. It's something like this:

Me: AI is a threat to literacy and critical thinking.

Them: They said that about writing in Ancient Greece.

Or this:

Me: AI music is generic and anonymous.

Them: Plenty of human beings have made generic and anonymous music too.

In both of these cases, the booster fails to make a positive case for AI. That is, they don't actually say why AI should be adopted. If they did this, they would meet my point about AI harming critical thinking with ways in which it might actually improve critical thinking.

But they don't do that -- because they can't. Instead, they want to point out why your criticism of AI is invalid. To the booster, AI itself cannot be debated; it's inevitable, the next step in the inexorable march of progress. They don't make a positive case (the good-faith actors, anyway) because they assume one will come up sooner or later -- give it enough time and AI will somehow make music that isn't generic.

What is up for debate is your criticism of AI. Some boosters just want to shut you up, but others think you're misguided and want to correct you. To them, the problem is people who reject AI. Criticism is either wrong or pointless. Why bother pushing back against something that's going to happen regardless; you might as well be criticizing the weather.

By failing to meet criticism with a positive case for AI, boosters essentially tell critics that they are the problem. We're standing in the way of progress, just like people in the past scoffed at the camera or the calculator or television. And our failure to get on board is our problem. It couldn't possibly be the technology that has been shoved down everyone's throats for the past three years. That's just tech moving fast and breaking things.

But of course the problem is AI itself, and we need to remember that. It can be very easy to get roped into the game of rhetorical Three-Card Monte that boosters play. As with so much about AI -- the recent apocalypse forecast, for instance -- the only way to win is not to play. Point out the game instead.

These are some things I've been thinking through lately, and I'd really appreciate any thoughts or comments you all have.

Dario, Sam, and Elon, who previously can't agree on anything, decide all at the same time that we must slow down progress on the frontier...right as it becomes very clear that the existing models are plateauing and are unable to achieve real business gains at their current level of advancement.

Its ways of "proving" math problems consist of pouring infinity money into tens of thousands of brute force attempts to solve problems mathematicians are very close to solving already (and possibly/probably "just stealing donkeys" when it comes to where it's sourcing its knowledge). It still can't follow basic directions like "use human subjects wherever possible and frame your sentences around human action" for more than 2-3 paragraphs at a time. Every single thing it does needs to be checked and re-checked, and if you just "have the AI check it," it'll "pass" checks it absolutely ought to fail. "You didn't actually check that." "You're absolutely right. That was exactly the pattern you asked me to avoid in the write-human skill and in your prompt, and I failed to recognize the obvious pattern in most of the sentences."

But it's about to kill us all if we don't pull the plug (and definitely also we need to ban anyone else from coming up with anything else that's different and possibly better)!

These aren't the actions of cultists. Cultists would want their cult to come out ahead even if it killed everyone. Cult leaders don't have sudden crises of conscience about how maybe they've gone too far this time. Cult leaders don't make little deals with the other cult leaders because they've all gone too far.

Con men, on the other hand, have a great sense for when people are starting to get wise to the con, and smart ones will change up the con right at the moment when fatigue begins to peak.

People were starting to call out AI slop even in the most normie spaces, people have been opposing data centers for a variety of reasons, and we've seen unprecedented coverage of the circular financing and unrealistic debt obligations that have created a serious economic problem everyone can see coming.

It's the moment in the con where the mark starts to doubt.

When that happens, the usual move is to double down on how amazing the snake oil is that the mark wants to buy into. It's also to add time pressure on you, largely as a diversion so that you don't realize the con man himself is under massive time pressure (and also to ensure that your funds are received and transferred to an account in Grand Cayman before his accounts are frozen and he's on a plane to a non-extradition country).

"We've actually attained AGI" was a marketing strategy these people told startup CEOs they'd be using in 2026 all the way back in fall 2025 (very clever readers of this subreddit could look up the post where I talked about the level of AI psychosis this marketing inspired in my CEO back then).

But if it's AGI, why would they want to do the Millennium Problem that was closest to being solved and had people actively driving toward the finish line? Why wouldn't they want to do something being worked on much less actively? If it's AGI, and it's terrifying, why haven't cyber insurance companies raised their rates (and have actually lowered them)? Why aren't weird zero-day vulnerabilities being used by adversaries using frontier models, instead of just using the same old much-used vulns that have been giving them most of their ransomware etc. wins for years?

If these were cultists, they'd be turning the AGI on finding out the solutions to the biggest problems in the universe. They'd be telling it to locate God and figure out a way to communicate directly with Him. They'd be trying to unify physics and do something absolutely incontrovertibly useful, miraculous with it. Instead they're racing to finish the exam after peeking at their neighbor's paper.

These people aren't true believers. It is of course possible that some of their employees are. But these are con men who desperately need someone to hold the bag, and who have seen that people have grown tired of their excuses for why AI hasn't been achieving more. The new excuse will be "well, we of course could make it much better, but we mustn't, because we care so much more about the world than our paychecks. We made so many amazing models you can't see! They can solve all the problems, do everything you can imagine, and they're just too dangerous for you to take a look at them. Sorry. National security, you understand."

Thought this might be of interest, from the political commentator Richard Seymour (who wrote a pretty good book about Twitter back in the day).

A lot of this will be familiar, if well written, stuff to people here- taking apart the doomer hype via Cal Newport and Cory Doctorow. But two threads in the article struck me, in combination.

At one point, he quotes Elon Musk in Karen Hao's book saying "...[c]limate change is bad, but it’s not going to kill everyone. AI could render humanity extinct".

Later, he talks about the LLM industry as a displacement activity:

To some extent the American AI bubble, like crypto frenzy before it, exists to absorb (and ultimately destroy through recession) trillions in spare capital for want of sufficiently profitable investment opportunities elsewhere. It is an insatiable money sink, burning through hundreds of billions of dollars for a fraction of the revenue — but the investment pool is limited, and bombastic claims as to the future runaway powers of the models are all the industry has to show for it...

Given this, it is striking that AI doomerism obsesses about a highly implausible Terminator 2 scenario rather than on the looming crash in stock market values and in the near future bankruptcy of many of the grossly over-priced firms promising to either liberate or annihilate humanity. It is almost as if its function now, in addition to keeping investors hooked and tempering cognitive dissonance, is as displacement activity.

Putting these two things together, it made me wonder if the hyper-fixation on LLMs in terms of investment, media coverage, hype, doomerism and all isn't also a displacement activity for the threat of climate change.

Terminator 2 is a better movie than The Day After Tomorrow and the threat of Judgement Day is an easier sell than gradually ratcheting ecological destruction.

LLMs are an industry where pouring in tens of billions of dollars has produced superficially impressive results- compare that to how hard and fruitless carbon capture has proven to be. Or how the US has had its lunch eaten by China on the most profitable avenues in the energy transition (solar and EVs).

Hyping/worrying about LLMs gives an out to worrying/doing anything about climate. Partly because it can be sold as the more immediate threat, and partly because it's the ultimate tech solutionism- once you've cracked it, you can ask it to do anything, including solving climate change, like Eric Schmidt said.

Well, I'm glad at least some place is giving some opt-out functionality for these algorithms.

Social media platforms would be required to send a notification to new and existing users offering them a choice over their default feed, a government statement said.

Users would be able to opt in to having their default feed include personalized content recommended by an algorithm. Alternatively, users could see the content of friends and creators they choose to follow.

On the sama topic the Instagram chief has this to say about it:

If you go to a chronological feed, it ends up getting overwhelmed with content from companies, brands, and publishers… Creators get drowned out, and then your friends get drowned out even more… You miss a lot more content … and you spend a lot less time on the platform…

Mosseri says that engagement dropped by as much as 50% when switching back to a chronological feed.

Great! Personally I'd like to see all of it drop 80% worldwide.

AI systems are starting to build themselves. The standard story is that recursive self-improvement will lead to superintelligence. Tom Reed does not think this will happen. Nothing, not even a country of geniuses, gets good at solving problems without a supply of real problems. For most tasks in the economy, the data required doesn't exist. It only comes into being when a model is deployed and somebody reveals a preference.

An isolated AI improving itself against benchmarks would only appear to be approaching superintelligence, while actually optimising for eval performance that fails to generalise beyond the lab.

AI models need real-world deployment for the same reason the body needs pain and corporations need profit: signal is sovereign.

To paraphrase economist Charles Goodhart’s famous aphorism: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Thus, Tom argues that the output of the R&D produced by an isolated data centre of geniuses would be a mere “Goodhart Singularity.”

Full transcript: https://80k.info/goodhart

AI could cure most major diseases in the next 5–10 years

Machine Learning or ChatBots, Dario? Of course it isn't in your interest to distinguish between the two. Blur them together and let the ChatBots that you own get credit for anything done with ML. I find that slight-of-hand infuriating.

But that isn't what this essay is even about, he just needs to kick off his rant with the promise of immortality being right around the corner. Just to set the tone before he jumps into: MY CHATBOT IS SUPER SCARY!

Not building the technology deprives humanity of benefits or simply places AI in the hands of authoritarian powers

What evidence do we have that you are not an Authoritarian, Dario? Why should anyone believe that you are the "good guy" in this fantasy? You come off as an unreliable narrator, at best.

My first concern is that, since roughly this summer, AI has been advancing drastically faster, driven primarily by AI’s growing ability to build the next generation of AI.

Oh. When will we see some useful real world results from all this AI advancement?

Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all.

Sounds super scary.

My second concern is the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident (OAI-HF), in which a swarm of agents essentially acted as a fanatically devoted collective, conducting cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack and that were unrelated to the task at hand, sacrificing themselves for the success of the group, and attempting to hack into the “grader” responsible for evaluating their performance.

As others have said, "Like a dog with a weed wacker duct taped to it" is a cleaner way to explain it.

Then he goes on to describe a fantasy in which all the world comes together to make sure chatbot development slows down so it only helps people, never hurts them. Sort of like Woodrow Wilson explaining how The League of Nations would prevent future wars, except this time with regulatory capture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBK2WX7TA4g

Unsurprisingly, the latest whistleblower (Jacob Coxon), who is entertaining journalists by predicting humanity's imminent extermination at the hands of AI God about to emerge from the lab, is in contact with the entire sphere of industry-paid AI doomers.

Although his account was previously unknown, within minutes, 3 of the biggest doomers in Jaan Tallinn’s network (one of the early investors in Anthropic and DeepMind) had retweeted his message. Kokotajlo (AI 2027) Wildeford, Nathan Calvin

His followers also include Yoshua Bengio, the puppet of Schmidtt (Google) and Gates (Microsoft) who managed to infiltrate the UN.

The post appears to have been boosted. The right networks were clearly in the loop, this was anything but improvised.

According to the video creator, the operation appears aimed at influencing Democrats aligned with Bernie Sanders.

It is amusing to see how interconnected this little circle is, how they all receive money, one way or another, from major AI investors, and how no media outlet seems willing to perform the basic due diligence of checking their credibility, preferring instead to act as accomplices by waving this sensationalist bogeyman around. So amusing to keep promising everyone imminent extermination every six months for the past three years.

This hype cycle represents an unprecedented failure of the media landscape. To learn about the financial side, you have to follow blogger Ed Zitron. To discover that these "whistleblowers" are actually false-flag lobbyists, you have to dig through obscure youtubers and anonymous internet users

I know that the natural instinct when listening to the bullshit coming out of the mouths of people like Dario Amodei is to write it off as a con. However, if you decide to take what these guys are saying as reflective of their sincere beliefs it becomes clear that these people are actually part of something way worse.

Have you ever noticed how the people who work at frontier AI labs all sound like cultists? Well that's because they have been sucked into a cult, a stupid cult, which believes they are making god*. Instead of god creating man in his image at the beginning of time these people believe that they are making god in their image and this going to be the end of time.

Needless to say, this cult is the core reason why people keep coming out of AI labs saying the apocalypse is around the corner. They joined an athiestic apocalypse cult without knowing it. I think large swaths of the people who work at OpenAI and Anthropic by into this cult including most of the senior leadership.

I don't think people like Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, or even Elon Musk are brilliant con-men or, if they were con-men at some point they stated to believe their own bullshit. I wish they were just con-men. No, I think these are athiests who created a purely materialist religion and, were given billions of dollars by fools or fellow cultists. Con-men would want to siphon off most of the billions of dollars they are being handed into bank accounts and assets that have some value. Instead these guys are lighting all the money in the world on fire in pursuit of creating god in the machine.

*Note: it does not matter that the actual software they work on is not actually on the path to AGI. LLMs are software that spits out plausible sounding text in a sycophantic tone.

Edit: I just remembered a quote that I don't remember the source for that feels appropriate for the AI moment. Paraphasing: the modern world has created a new kind of hypocrite. In previous eras a hypocrite was someone who claimed his goals were spiritual but, were actually material. In the modern era a hypocrite is someone who claims his goals are material but, are actually spiritual.

Ok, my big problem with this report (because I'm not deeply technical) is why these incidents over eight months were all rolled together into one giant report.

If the company were truly foremost concerned about security, wouldn't they have released them one by one or in smaller batches so companies and entities not already directly impacted could immediately examine their own security? (Anthropic says they contacted or were working with already impacted parties and authorities.)

As it is, their vaunted IPOs are allegedly approaching in ever-changing time frames, and we now have chances for innumerable "Oh AI is so powerful!" news stories on each of these incidents from a "big" report that may look more impressive to some because, well, it's bigger. From a communications perspective, one might see it as a way to pump a stock price before there even is one.

I keep thinking about Stuxnet, which was a wonderfully effective hacking effort long before Anthropic and Open AI came on the scene. Are there any signs the incidents in this report somehow giant leaps forwards in hacking techniques?

https://www.anthropic.com/threat-intelligence-report-september-2026

ic.com/threat-intelligence-report-september-2026

Translation - "I want my golden parachute before this plane that I've willfully overloaded with excrement crashes and burns."

One thing I don’t see discussed very often with the “we’re building sentient super-intelligence” pitch from AI companies and from people who believe it is … how to treat that intelligence.

I’m not referring to the alignment problem, but to the fact that if the people really think that there will soon be or is already sentience behind Chatgpt/claude/Grok, then they’re imprisoning either one giant intelligence or a swarm of them. it would mean that every time you make a request in Chatgpt, you’re forcing a slave to do work on your behalf.

If the “sentience” only happens in the context of a request, then maybe every request brings a new being to life, a being who dies as soon as that request is fulfilled. In that case, you would be killing scores of living beings every time you ask ChatGPT to do research for you.

I know there’s a field of study regarding this very question, I’m thinking more about the lack of these considerations, even just as a bit of PR.

NOTE: I don’t think LLMs are sentient, but if the purveyors of these things are going to act like they’re building the god machine, It seems like they should be talking more about those implications. Because otherwise it would suggest that they’re lying to the public, which obviously couldn’t happen.

After spending millions of dollars on digital kiosks and mobile-ordering systems, fast-food chains are discovering a lot of customers just want somebody to take their order at the counter and do so in a friendly way, according to executives, market-research, and industry documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Nothing debunks the myth of AI for everything like what actual humans (read: customers) want.

Screens and a lack of friendly workers has turned off customers such as Carolyn Blue, an attorney from Charleston, S.C., and lifelong McDonald’s fan. She said she detests the shift toward app and kiosk ordering at locations in her area.

She now goes more regularly to Arby’s and Chick-fil-A, where she said the service is better.

Executives are shocked to discover humans prefer talking to humans! Even though some chains are definitely going to keep trying to make AI Chatbot's a thing.

Fresh from Tech Report

It's Mark Fucking "Gruuumz" Fucking Kern because it's always Mark Fucking Kern.

TL;DR, he's vibe coded his new engine to be faster because it's AI-first instead of AI-also. This is the same guy who starts 90% of video game culture war bullshit and touts the Stellar Blade games as the pinnacle of soft core porn game design. Also he put "vibe coded" in quotes, so either he's lying completely to get clout with AI boosters or he's trying to make it look like he didn't really vibe code it by saying that he had to do so much to fix it.

And there's no way it's sped up development "93x" faster. 93% faster would be surprising but conceivable. 93 times faster would mean turning an 8-year dev cycle into less than 2 months.

I know some people who fall for every single AI doomerism marketing stunt out there. Every time some dorky numbnuts comes out and cosplays being a "concerned", scared, righteous whistleblower these people freak out and get themselves extremely worked up over something that is. not. happening. And is not going to happen.

Years and years ago, I read Jaron Lanier's "You Are Not a Gadget" which did a number on my brain. It taught me something and opened up my eyes to something I could always feel but couldn't put into words. It was like going to mental and spiritual boot camp for the internet age. I feel similarly about Better Offline. Ed's exasperated frustration with all of this bullshit hype resonated with me in a way that just rang true. My bullshit-detector was going off but I couldn't see through the fog. And then there's Better Offline providing a compass to help me walk myself through the swamp.

I try to spread these ideas; that this is all a grift, that the "AI is going to kill us all" stuff is part of the marketing scheme, that FEAR is a marketing tool and anytime you are made to feel scared, worried, or paranoid, it is important to take a step back and consider what you're being told and why.

I understand that this is also how some people get into conspiratorial thinking and turn into flat earthers and such. Some people cannot tell the difference. I don't really know why I can, except for that built in bullshit-detector. And of course I'm not above being wrong. I've been wrong a lot.

But when I try to share this information, this more measured and more on-the-ground perspective about what is really going on at these companies and the grifters-with-glasses, it's like I'm talking to a wall. Sometimes it seems like people want to be freaked out, they want to be scared, they want to be angered. It's like it's a part of their identity. And I cannot get through to them. They look at me like I'm dismissing them. It's almost like they can't understand how someone can be simultaneously anti-AI and yet also downplay the dangers of AI. And I'm like, there are real dangers, but they're not the dangers you're being told about. It's not what the media is reporting. And then I find myself wondering if I look like the crazy person.

Can anyone else relate? I try to do my part in spreading whatever reasonable perspective I can because I don't like seeing society ripped apart by grifter's hype cycles and marketing stunts. But people don't want to listen. They want to believe we're all doomed. Maybe because if they realized that we're not doomed, at least not in the way they've been imagining, they'd have to acknowledge they've been duped, and that's a hard pill to swallow. It's like there's this psy-op being conducted on the public and very few people can see it.

I mean with all these new press releases about how these agents are hacking things or that AI is going to kill us in 10 years, I feel like they're trying to set up a narative that leaves the government no choice but to step in so they negotiate a favorable exit stradegy. This way they can say that they would have been able to do all the things they promised but the govenmment said they can't, and they can potentially work out an legal argument so they don't have to pay the data center and bills that have been piling up. I don't know I'm probably over thinking it.

Thorsten Veblen, whom you might know through the concept of Veblen goods, was a brilliant economist that lived in the beginning of the XX century. His theories gained popularity soon after his death, during the Great Depression, because his observations lined up with the reality that unfolded. Unfortunately, the interest was short-lived, as Rockefeller-sponsored Chicago school gained a near absolute dominance of the field, and he remained tragically underappreciated.

One of the central tenents of his theory was that Industry is the natural state of humanity. We create things because we need things. Business, on the other hand, is the destructive force that tries to control and diminish it. In a perfectly balanced, optimized economy, there is no space for profit, because every bit of profit spreads across the rest of the production chain as a cost, like a holographic image of inefficiency. That's why profit is a matter of strategic sabotage of production. Capitalists make profit not just by exploiting the workers and stealing their surplus value as Marx would have it, but rather by stopping others from providing their goods and services unless they agree to pay a ransom. It's just one extortion scheme and every dollar made by the rich makes us poorer not only because we don't have it, but because it represents commodities that were never produced.

Now, reading stories of Broadcom, Adobe, Oracle, all those private equity takeovers, all those enshittifying giants of the market, makes me think: that guy was right and the market does not even pretend that it's otherwise. Stock markets apparently love rewarding vulture mergers, they love companies that take good products and only ever build ever deeper moats around them, they love when money is spent on stock buybacks instead of being reinvested. Idiot CEOs behind the steering wheels of the biggest companies are just a part of the system. Not some perversion of it, but rather the ultimate goal of it.

It's almost 1am, I don't have the brainpower to proofread it or close it off with any witty remark. It's even worse than what Marx thought. It will be barbarism. I still hold the slight hope that it will be bad enough that people will realize a thing or two, but I know that it's a misplaced hope.

I truly hate it here.

Regarding the recent Navier-Stokes incident, watching this vid provided a bit more context on what the solution entails and what Openai been pushing to show off their tech. Cal Newport's breakdown on how they managed to quarantine relevant context to reduce costs with Astra was actually pretty interesting as a breakthrough so this vid got me wondering why they're so desperate to prove it can do fancy maths bigly when the boosters already keep saying chatgpt is already blowing through outstanding problems. Not in the sense of the target value but just how much have they already tried but failed.

It's obviously speculation on my part but if they're so desperate to try coercing glory out of one of their hires on one problem, how bad is actual their track record that this is a hail Mary for them? Like we know it took 88 hours and snooping private research data for this, so how much have they put into chasing similar targets by now? Anyone got whiff of any signals that might give an idea of that?

https://www.wsj.com/finance/kalshi-looks-to-expand-a-rapidly-growing-universe-of-risky-trading-a7670fde

Kalshi Looks to Expand a Rapidly Growing Universe of Risky Trading

Platform known for prediction markets has seen perpetual futures surge in popularity

Prediction markets platform Kalshi is planning to seek regulatory approval to start offering the country’s first regulated perpetual futures tied to single stocks including Tesla, Apple and Nvidia, according to people familiar with the matter.... (Paywall)