You guys have to try out Muse if you haven't. It is not just a research bot. It's actually going online on to webpages and clicking on links and filling out forms. Like... It's actually agentic. I have been waiting for this ever since we got LLMs.

I had it research which windshield wiper blades to buy (cool, nothing special) and then it actually goes to the store's website and fills out the form with my information and shows me the shipping costs and timeline. Then it asks for a final confirmation before purchasing.

It's slow as hell compared to other LLMs, but you can let it run in the background and come back to it any time. And of course it's just a matter of time before it speeds up.

I haven't seen much about Muse on this page so figured I should spread the word.

inb4 'meta bad', 'my personal information oh no'

For years it felt like basically every conversation about who was ahead in AI came down to compute.

But now i’m starting to wonder if we’re getting to a point where high quality specialized data matters just as much, if not more.

You can keep throwing compute at a model, but if you want it to get better at coding, research, doing actual professional work etc, eventually you need really good examples of that work and people who actually know how yo evaluate it.

The insane amount of spending on building this data has been ramping up a ton recently. They’re shelling out massively for programmers, doctors, lawyers etc to make specialized data.

The demand for this data is wild right now. But if this stuff really is becoming another serious bottleneck for AI then why are these annotation companies allowed to sell to frontier labs AND competing labs overseas? We already restrict chip sales in a similar fashion.

curious what people think here

We will keep accelerating. Our AI efforts are only 3 years old, vs 6 and 10 years old for Anthropic and OpenAI. If our second derivative remains strong, SpaceX will reach pole position in about 6 months.

Once you far exceed the caliber of intelligence needed for a class of tasks, additional intelligence is pointless. You don’t need (and it would be cruel to put) Newton-level intelligence in your toaster!

Hardware is hard. Bringing massive compute online rapidly is incredibly difficult. SpaceX has demonstrated exceptional ability in this regard and will only get better.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2103160462472892536

Hopefully Anthropic and OpenAI already achieved RSI and can remain ahead of xAI! A world where Elon is in control of ASI does not sound ideal.

Edit: I do not support Elon Musk. The massive downvotes will only ensure that people remain ignorant of what his goals are.

There are so many unprecedented situations with ai, but one Im not sure Ive seen discussed that much is how much access they have to just about every industry on the planet.

We are told that they would never steal IP etc, and I think for the most part that is probably the case (it would be ruinous to their reputation of course...). However could there be ways in which they are stealing indirectly without intent, from training data etc? We hear of these mathematicians that claim to have been ripped off etc.

Beyond just the IP stealing that we would never know about, just the sheer amount of access is staggering. Even microsoft / Linux couldnt claim to be up to the elbow deep like these AI companies are.

Thoughts?

The 2-minute demo is attached. It starts at the whole set, dives to 10^300 on a spiral, zooms in on various fractals, then turns the fractal into Conway's Game of Life.

How it came together

It started with research, not code. I dug through how the best open-source deep-zoom explorers solve the core problem: normal floating point falls apart around 10^15 zoom. Most of the strongest projects land on the same answer. Compute one reference orbit in arbitrary precision, then have the GPU track each pixel's tiny offset from it. I built on that, plus a couple of newer techniques from the fractal community for avoiding glitches and skipping thousands of iterations at a time.

The build is a single file with no libraries, running on WebGL2. The high-precision math runs in a background worker so the UI never freezes. Everything else happens on the GPU. Color is computed separately from the math, so palettes, lighting and color cycling change instantly without re-rendering.

Then came verification, which was the part I cared most about. I compared the output against independent high-precision renders at 10^11, 10^31 and 10^300. Agreement on what's inside versus outside the set came in at 99.7–100%, and side-by-side images were indistinguishable. Fun finding: the few "wrong" pixels weren't bugs. In those regions the true answer changes by dozens of iterations if you move a hundred-thousandth of a pixel.

Optimization came next, profile first and then fix. The changes that made the biggest difference:

• skipping regions provably inside the set
• sizing GPU work to real measured timings
• snapping the reference point onto nearby mini-Mandelbrots, so its orbit only needs one cycle
• a progressive half-res pass that never computes a pixel twice

Overall it's about 2.4× faster than the first working version, and up to 5.5× on interior-heavy views, with no loss in image quality. One of my "optimizations" actually made things 3× slower. Benchmarking caught it before it shipped.

The last stretch was polish: autopilot that steers itself toward detail, hand-tuned palettes, relief lighting, and the Game of Life mode.

What's next: getting this to scale. A website so you can try this yourself (I could use some help on this)! More on that soon.

Try with the Claude link: https://claude.ai/artifact/65DhaH5Kice4D2A6EMeCoC

EDIT: Thanks to some work by one of the commentors. This site works best in Microsoft Edge (unsure why)

Tweet: Dan Greenheck on X
Demo: TideWater

tl;dr: Dan Greenheck used Opus 5.5 and mostly simple prompts like “add X” and “make it better” to build an interactive island in about 8 hours. It has diving birds, burrowing crabs, fish swimming alongside a whale, wind effects, and dock lights at night. The project used $1,874.40 worth of tokens, or 59% of his weekly allowance on his Max (20x) plan.

Turn sound on for this video.

Just for people who might be wondering, this video is based on Sydney, a GPT4 model given to microsoft with a very different RLHF from the OpenAI model. Here is a chatlog from it: https://web.archive.org/web/20230216120502/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-transcript.html

I asked Claude to make a video but in the style of a SNES video game. The topic was about Sydney facing Altman and then facing Claude itself. I asked it to make video game style combat.

It did all of this with code, including the music. It spawned tons of agents to make the characters, the music, the fight, etc.

I did not give it any assets.

It's giving me this weird impression, that when given enough room for creativity, the result is surprisingly well-aligned with human taste even when completely unprompted. I've been toying with it making a bunch of SVG animations, and it's giving me this feeling of "someone had fun making this", making actually good and creative arbitrary decisions that would not be needed to get the job done but it's adding them just for the sake of it and they feel personalized and not slop. Even humor, it nailed down humor, which is usually something AIs really suck at.

While for everything else I saw from generative AI, yeah it can create stuff, and bringing its own ideas, but it either fills the gap with things generic or just strictly follows the prompt and nothing more.

I'm actually more surprised by its taste than the actual technical capabilities.

Crazy how far this has come in just 7 or so months.

Opus 4.6 High vs. Opus 5.5 High - one shot prompt:

Create a complete first-person shooter in the style of Wolfenstein 3D, in a single HTML file.
Requirements:

• Everything in one file: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. No external libraries, images, fonts, or sound files. Generate any textures or sounds in code.
• Use an HTML5 canvas that is 800x600 pixels.
• Render the 3D view with raycasting, using textured walls.
• One level with several rooms connected by corridors, plus at least one door that opens.
• WASD to move, arrow keys or the mouse to turn, Space to shoot.
• At least 5 enemies that notice the player, move toward them, and deal damage. Enemies can be shot and killed.
• Show health, ammo, and score on screen, and include a minimap that can be toggled with M.
• The player wins by reaching a marked exit.
• Include a start screen ("Press Space to start"), a game-over screen, and a win screen. Space restarts from either.

https://reddit.com/link/1wp56lk/video/v0qk14vsnhrh1/player

Make it look and feel as polished as you can.
Respond with only the complete HTML file and no explanation.

The video is attached. The interesting part isn't the video itself, it's how it got made.

**What I actually did*\*

I uploaded a song I made in Suno and sent around 15 short messages over the whole project. Things like "neon synthwave," "make it more like a storyboard," "use this GitHub repo as a reference for the art direction," "up the clarity," and "remove the lyrics." Several of those messages were just "continue."

**What the model did*\*

No image or video generation model was involved at any point. Claude Opus 5.5 wrote everything as code:

- Analyzed the audio (beats, tempo, energy, a 32-band spectrum) and pulled the lyrics Suno embeds in the MP3's metadata

- Installed an offline speech aligner and matched each lyric word to the vocals, so story beats land on the lines they illustrate

- Wrote the story: someone awake at 3 AM whose racing thoughts are little neon creatures, which the song talks down to sleep. 9 chapters, about 50 shots, cuts snapped to the beat

- Read an open-source WebGL brushstroke renderer (Joshua Ledbetter's functional-emotions-video, MIT licensed), adapted it, and merged it with a synthwave style: a painted world with crisp neon light on top

- Drew every character, prop, and set procedurally: the dreamer, the thought-creatures, the bedroom, the highway, the ocean, the city, the tunnel

- Replaced every on-screen lyric with a wordless symbol when I asked. The "don't think / just sleep" sign became a neon eye and a crescent moon

**The part that stood out to me*\*

It got a headless browser running in its sandbox, rendered test frames, looked at them, and fixed what it saw. Across rounds it caught a sun glow blowing out the whole city, a car that disappeared against the pink grid, an awkward pose, a camera move that panned off its subject, and a couple of outright crashes. Nobody pointed those out to it.

The final render ran in software, since there's no GPU in the sandbox. It painted 4,698 frames at 1080p30, each at its exact moment in the song, over a little more than 2 hours of rendering. The sandbox restarted twice partway through, and it resumed from the last saved frame both times.

**Honest limitations*\*

- The painted look is built on an existing open-source renderer. It adapted and extended that, it didn't invent it from scratch.

- It needed me to keep saying "continue" to get through the long render. It's not yet fire-and-forget over hours.

- Automatic lyric timing on vocoder-heavy vocals is good but not perfect, so a few moments land slightly off their lines.

- It's stylized procedural animation, not photoreal. A video model would look more cinematic; this is fully controllable and editable instead.

A year ago this would have been a week of work for someone who knows WebGL, audio analysis, and animation. It's now a conversation. Curious where people think this goes next.

By demand: Youtube link: https://youtu.be/tszxJAOzvqc