(The spooks shall soon be upon us.)
Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
it's_happening.gif
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/openai-halts-frontier-model-training-amid-string-of-agent-misalignment-incidents/
am I supposed to read this in any way other than "the model didn't predict the text we expected?" or "the model didn't get better enough at $benchmark" e.g. training skill issue
It's been widely suspected that any of the "frontier" labs declaring a slowdown or cessation of training would be a herald of collapse. It will give them more survival time at the expense of terminally falling behind the competition. Very much an eating the seed corn sort of thing.
Edit: I could be wishcasting, though.
I don't think you're wrong on the latter bit - if these were any other shartups (or, at least, pre "AI" shartups), this would be read as a "runway extending move". mild testament to just how much/completely the current crop of con has shifted the focus used in that world
imo all the "rahrah safety!" noises have been a figleaf to obscure that very inconvenient aspect
It might be wishful thinking, but it would also answer the question: why now? It's not like the concerns are meaningfully different now compared to when the bubble started. If they were so convinced that the AI future was both inevitable and possibly catastrophic, they could have followed Yud into the "research foundation" game rather than accelerating the timeline. I guess they're probably more convinced than I am that the latest round of security breaches are actually a sign of new capabilities in the models, but it still feels really convenient. Frontier model advancements have been slowing down and costs have been accelerating exponentially, and now they're taking the line that they're choosing to slow progress and spend less money on arguably their biggest cost center.
I'll believe that things are happening when Larry Ellison goes flat broke
And thus the greasy opportunist Altman gets to take advantage of his true-believer colleagues to save a buck
said equally greasy true believers at anthropic apparently filed S1 on the same day
pog
About damn time