Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
The US economy is 100% on coyote time.
It wouldn't matter if everyone came to their senses today. All the money that's been invested into AI is gone. It has been turned into heat and swiftly-depreciating assets and can never be recouped.
It's surreal isn't it?
AI Shovelware: One Month Later by Mike Judge
The fact that we’re not seeing this gold rush behavior tells you everything. Either the productivity gains aren’t real, or every tech executive in Silicon Valley has suddenly forgotten how capitalism works.
... por que no los dos ...
Or, this is how capitalism has always worked. See Enron for example. And we all just got so enthralled by the number (praised be its rise) that we took the guardrails off. The rising tidal wave which will flood all the land, raises all boats after all.
The goal of capitalism is not to produce goods, it is to create value for the owners of the capital. See also why techbros are turning on EA and EA (which EA is which, is left as an exercise to the reader).
Disappointed this wasn't Beavis & Butt-head/King of the Hill/Office Space/Idiocracy/Silicon Valley Mike Judge
Check out this epic cope from an Anthropic employee desperately trying to convince himself and others that actually LLMs are getting exponentially better
https://www.julian.ac/blog/2025/09/27/failing-to-understand-the-exponential-again/
Includes screenshots of data where he really really hopes you don't look at the source, and links to AI 2027.
I took a quick peek at his blog.
Oh dear, there is a dedicated rationality subsection...
Oh god, he unironically recommends reading the sequences wtf 🤢🤮
Surprise level: zero
Great response^
I think Julian is going to be mildly surprised that METR’s chart keeps going up, and yet, will have relatively small effect on the majority of swe roles.
At the same time, he did create alphaZero so he has a big old noggin! I wonder, after his success at Go, was he swept up in the mania that we would quickly translate that success to create super duper ai?
Links to the METR tasks w/ massive error bars at 50% level lmaou.
Someone in the comments rightly points out the comparison with covid isn’t apt. With covid, underlying mechanism caused an exponential effect in covid’s spread
With LLMs the exponential trend is being caused by exponentially spending money and a healthy dose of targeting benchmarks, which is why people are calling the top. The money literally doesn’t exist for this shit to go on so you can create your 50% accurate mechanical turk.
Edit: idk the more I think about this the more it irks me. Like if I was allowed to pick and choose benchmarks that agree with my biases I would post something like this…
… and claim model performance is actually getting worse over time.
The second screenshot goes to a chart where the Y axis is labelled
Task duration (for humans) where logistic regression of our data predicts the AI has a 50% chance of succeeding
So they're just extrapolating an exponential, not actually measuring it.
links to AI 2027.
In Dutch we have a saying (from a commercial, well done on the advertisers there) 'Wij van Wc-eend adviseren Wc-eend' (we from the company Wc-eend, suggest you get Wc-eend), which seems appropriate here. It is used in a sarcastic context when somebody gives advice with a clear conflict of interest.
Anyway, just going from the title, 'X is exponential' has been the pro AI cry since the singularity is near. (Which said, well individual tech follows an S-curve, but all the techs combined are exponential, and variants on that). All seems very hopeium, immortality is near!
Microsoft launches ‘vibe working’ in Excel and Word
A new Office Agent in Copilot chat, powered by Anthropic models, is also launching today that can create PowerPoint presentations and Word documents from a “vibe working” chatbot.
Microsoft says its Agent Mode in Excel has an accuracy rate of 57.2 percent in SpreadsheetBench, a benchmark for evaluating an AI model’s ability to edit real world spreadsheets.
They are openly admitting this? Do they really not realize how completely damning the number is...?
Dont worry about the number it will improve after the singularity.
Opening the sack with this shit that spawned in front of me:
Guess it won’t be true AGI!
Is this true for everything else, too? I will be a true AGI if I solve quantum gravity. A half eaten salami will be true AGI if it solves quantum gravity. My grandmother will be a true bicycle if she has wheels.
If saltman knew what quantum gravity was and why LLMs won’t solve it first, maybe he’d have general intelligence
On top of everything else, "the father of quantum computing" is such lazy writing. People were thinking about it before Deutsch, going back at least to Paul Benioff in 1979. Charlie Bennett and Giles Brassard's proposal for quantum key distribution predates Deutsch's quantum Turing machine... No one person should be called "the father of" a subject that had so many crucial contributors in such a short period of time.
Also, chalk up another win for the "billionaires want you to think they are physicists" hypothesis. It's perhaps not as dependable as pedocon theory, but it's putting in a strong showing.
wait, how much compute would they need for this, ignore patent absurdity of it all for a minute? would they wrap it up under 1 quadrillion dollars?
If we knew that we wouldn't need a GPT-8 to solve quantum gravity, would we now?
maybe 2, for good measure
Pigs will be a true method of space exploration if they can fly to Mars in 1 hour.
the father of quantum computing agrees
And then you read the article and he is basically just saying big if true.
GPT-8: The Ocho
Now trained with comprehensive coverage of top-fuel lawnmower racing and timbersports
I hear GPT-8 will broadcast a dyson sphere circumnavigation race
So as historically new versions are made about every ~2 years. This means we are 6 years out.
E: late edit, but this made me realize how often people use AGI to mean ASI. And that I also often do it.
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9183
Quantum scoot is quantum spooked 😱 after GPT-5 manages to solve a subproblem for him (after multiple attempts), thanks the powers that be for his tenure!
… even though GPT-5 probably generates the answer via websearch
After seeing this, I reminded myself that I've seen this type of thing happen before. Over the past half year, so many programmers enthusiastically embraced vibe coding after seeing one or two impressive results when trying it out for themselves. We all know how that is going right now. Baldur Bjarnason had some great essays (1, 2) about the dangers of relying on self-experimentation when judging something, especially if you're already predisposed into believing it. It's like a mark believing in a psychic after he throws out a couple dozen vague statements and the last one happens to match with something meaningful, after the mark interprets it for him.
Edit: Accidentally hit reply too early.
You think he would maybe, idk, search around to see if this was a known formula before making such a bombastic statement…
Funny how when there is something novel it always a) already existed in the training data or b) doesn't actually seem to work.
Oh yeah, he wrote an update saying that the LLM is still great, even if the result is already known, because it saves him time. We have come full circle back to the exact same value proposition as the vibe coders.
Maybe next he can get an LLM to automate his apologetics for genocide.
He could call it Vibonism.
Not sure if this was posted before
"There is no such thing as sex," Vox says from his lotus position, his eyes closed in religious ecstasy, "only the One Mind jerking itself off."
I only got through 3 paragraphs, that was plenty
seems like armin ronacher (originally of the flask, jinja & co fame) has also fallen into the vibecoding rabbit hole; which is generally a pity.
a good thing that the pallets projects are now independent from him (and if you build python clis, plubum is anyway much, much better than click).
He's been on the vibecoding bandwagon for quite some time on lobste.rs.
indeed, but that “90% of my code is now from ai” piece is even sadder than the rest.