The layers of self-delusion required for grown adults to get behind this Anthropic deal are wild. The *only* way Anthropic survives is if they make some sort of near-term technical breakthrough that suddenly makes Claude “superintelligent.” Psst. That’s LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE. LLMs are a commodity search product. You can run them on a laptop. They will get marginally better at mimicking the stuff in their training data over time. That’s it. There is not even a good theoretical model for how it leaps beyond the training data—except in cases where there is an external verifier like Lean you can brute force solutions in a limited set of dimensions from the pieces left by humans. Anthropic is now down to searching for Bigfoot—the notorious RSI. Recursive self improvement is nonsense. There is no mechanism for “FOOM” “takeoff” or any of that other doomer lingo. It’s exactly like trying to create perpetual motion, or “free energy.” They will always be “80% of the way there” because there is no external verifier to tell it what it’s doing better. You can’t take humans out of the loop. The LLM is made of humans. The company, and the entire chatbot industrial complex, is reliant on a religious conviction that has no scientific or logical rationale. Anthropic is an extension of the Yudkowsky Rationalist/Effective Altruist doomer cult. It’s run by people who believe in their hearts that they are the chosen ones to raise the digital messiah from the chaos of humanity, and teach it not to kill us. In short, they’re fucking nuts and so is anyone who invests in them. Anthropic is worth zero dollars. Claude help us all if they go IPO.

This week I examine artificial intelligence through the metaphor of Icarus, asking what risks arise when a civilization injects trillions of cognitive workers into a civilization that's already in resource overshoot. Our society already largely ignores the depleting fossil energy that powers our lives, now AI could amplify our economic growth imperative rather than help us escape it. What happens when a civilization optimized for growth without accounting for resilience introduces a technology such as AI? Watch: youtu.be/6yBYrmy0VW0

Language is not fundamental to human consciousness. In terms of evolution, it arrived only recently on our timeline. Consciousness evolved over millions of years through sensory awareness, emotion, and the embodied survival instincts of our tribal past; our capacity for empathic engagement and community. Syntactic language only emerged around 100,000 years ago. This is exactly why Large Language Models (LLMs - so called AI) are the wrong pathway to true artificial consciousness. They try to replicate the late-stage "output layer" of human intelligence without building the foundational, embodied awareness that actually generates it. Statistical text prediction is a mirror of thought, not the spine, the guts, the nerves and the subconscious, empathic ability to connect with other living beings. LLMs can never feel, let alone think. We have been sold a trick, not a pathway to superintelligence. LLMs are fraudulent. Their capabilities have already peaked and we are being sold lies about their future potential. Lies with the goal of companies reaching IPO and tricking investors out of hundreds of billion$.

Intelligence is not the bottleneck for economic growth: energy and materials are persuasion.community/p/why-i…

Perspective: People are so focused on the hacks they are missing the bigger picture. The bigger picture is that (current) agents aren’t reliable, and as a consequence can do all kinds bad things if given too many permissions etc. Here’s a good example of this has nothing to do whatsoever with hacking servers or cybersecurity.

My experience with EA goes back to many friends in college who fell in with the movement (great debates were had!) My assessment remains unchanged from those days: Because it purports to be quantifiable, EA is an ideology that one-shots STEM nerds who have never read a philosophy book before

Current models are getting close to PhD-level intelligence. After that, they're expected to achieve the intelligence of someone who decided not to do a PhD.

Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead. You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement. I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible. But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier. Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want. Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well. So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it. If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.