This was in the Financial Times. I don’t have a subscription, so I don’t know what article it was in, or what context, or if they are in on the joke of the general absurdity of the graph or not.

In case it’s not super obvious which one will happen, I will bet everything I have on it basically being the blue line. The graph has a log scale, that’s already exponential growth.


There were old Yudkowsky / Hanson debates about FOOM, and I’m curious how I felt about them at the time. Looking back on it it’s kind of embarrassing to ever have believed in the machine God at all, but there’s still believers out there, and this post is aimed at you. Kind of like a getting people out of Scientology thing. I heard once that the Singularity was just the rapture for 150+ IQ people and I dismissed it as some weird envy of 150-IQ-nerds-are-right thing. Umm yea, the people saying the rapture thing were right, and belief in the rapture for nerds is now migrating down the IQ slide.

There’s a bunch of ways this belief manifests. There’s insane hyperscaler spend on infrastructure, which is actually pretty cool and will have good effects long term when the bubble pops. The hyperscalers aren’t even wrong for taking the bet and buying GPUs, because the cost of missing out is existential. To their business, not to the world! Like Google is the most obvious candidate for AI disruption, how much do you search vs use AI today?

I suspect the ROI isn’t there for AI, everyone kind of knows this, yet not spending is still a huge risk. Much better for multiples to hype up the dawn of superintelligence instead of this is a capex race with strategic panic dynamics but we need to defend our moat.


Another is the absolute insanity of the SF/Twitter cult. I’m going to be in Berkeley in June and am already kind of dreading it. This energy is exhausting to be around, and many of these people behave like literal children. It’s always something I felt from SF tech, like there was something about these people that never grew up, even for the people who are way older than me.

I’m not going to give the Mythos spectacle any more attention, but this is the epitome of what I mean. As far as I can tell, these people actually think they are building the machine God with all the quasireligious hullaboo that goes with it. Now when you see how AI works and how it is and will be integrated into the economy, I’m ashamed to have ever believed in this. And just like Scientology, it’s a real worldview with real consequences for believing it.


None of this changes the real power of AI and the extent to which it will change the world. It is a technological change on par with the steam engine, and its effects will ripple into every industry just like the steam engine did. But now, can you think of a company that made steam engines? I honestly couldn’t, and I googled it and had never heard of the three Gemini Flash brought up.

Imagine a steam engine manufacturer talking about how they are building the Iron God. Like now we might see that as quaint and kind of retro cool, but ugh how insufferable people would be if they actually believed it. And we only see it as quaint because today we understand steam engines and have integrated them into our worldview.

And it didn’t just stop at steam engines. We built gasoline engines, diesel engines, jet engines, electric motors, they got better and better and better and A350s and e-bikes are sick! And they changed the world so much. But nobody worships an airplane.


AI models will continue to get better and better and better. We won’t go back to riding horses. The transformation is real. But it is a transformation, not a singularity.

I think a lot about how close we really are to human level. Humans are 100T (1e14) models trained on 100B (1e11) tokens. Times ~10 for the forwards and backwards, and we get that a 1e26 training run should be human level. And it kind of is, GPT 5.5 is awesome.

But 1e26 is a $100M training run. That’s the cost to build one homunculus. Sure it can be copied and sped up, but that’s normal industrial revolution dynamics applied to a new bottleneck, not God.

The 1e30 training runs will be fascinating, just like the early builders of steam engines would see a jet engine. Temperatures and metals and RPMs orders of magnitude better. Magical new capabilities unlocked; trips in under a day from New York to Singapore in superhuman flying machines. What is the mental equivalent?


So what does this mean for reality. This is a long grind of improvements. A lot of S-curves to ride. Efficiency, FLOPS/$, the thermodynamics of deep learning, TB/s, tensor compilers, petabytes of storage, it’s all so cool! And of course it’s cool, it’s everything computers have been since the beginning.

If I see one more person talk about how it’s the end of capitalism or humanity or jobs or something this levels of stupid, I think they need a time out in the corner of the playground. Take it from someone who went through it, not only is it not true, you can ruin your life with a dumb ideology like that.

We have lived at the end of history for so long that any movement feels like the eschaton.

But it’s not the end times. It’s just movement.