Even if all GCR models were banned, anyone with access to 20k-1MM GPUs can throw their hat in the ring to make a new frontier open model.
If history has shown one thing it’s that China often capitalizes very well on these types of measures.
I mean I don't know what we do at this point. Ideally AI researchers need to be treated like nuclear scientists working for an adversary. But we all know that's not going to happen.
I heavily use frontier models daily, and quite frankly their capabilities are just not very relevant outside of a narrow subset of software engineering tasks and the production of generic white collar "deliverables."
We're many years into $10s of billions of dollars being thrown at coding as a problem space specifically, and its one of the areas with the MOST training data available, and still...I can't get a frontier model to execute simple front-end UI tasks beyond the level of a visually impaired intern.
I believe Fable and Astra-class models were the first fully trained on Blackwell GPUs (the latest and greatest) and I think the expectation was that throwing this much extra compute at the problem would lead to greater gains. It has not. And the next gen GPUs are not going to be the same jump that h100 clusters to Blackwell was. Claiming you're slowing down out of choice, when in reality you've hit the limits given current compute, is disingenuous at best.
I think a lot of Anthropic/OpenAI employees are true believers here (who doesn't want to imagine they're having a large impact?) and have deluded themselves into believing they're building a god in their science fiction fantasy world.
Unfortunately the type of people working at these orgs apparently don't have much understanding of how the world works outside of their extremely narrow specialization.
When I hear them straight-faced throwing out dumb statistics like "8% GDP growth," "50% of white collar workers unemployed by next year," and "10% chance of human annihilation," I cringe so hard my eyebrows hit my chin. Here's a real statistic: 82% of German companies still use fax machines.
I seem to recall Waymo told a 60 minutes reporter during an early report on self driving cars: "your daughter will never need to learn to drive." Well, over a decade has passed since then, that girl got a drivers license, and we're still without driverless cars in 99% of places.
This capacity for self delusion is what enables silicon valley to take on these irrational moonshots...but these are the last people I would trust when trying to form an accurate picture of reality.
They need to buy time and protection and hope for a major break through to create escape velocity.
Btw I’d hire you - email?
82% number was shocking for me, even though I know they still send snail-mail for basically everything. And things only move when the snail-mail is received!
That's basically the western companies complaining that they can't compete with China because Chinese companies are allowed to polute more, so they would be allowed to polute as well. I don't buy that. Once you realise that you're doing something wrong or dangerous, you stop, regardless of what everyone else is doing and what rules they have to follow.
Some people say AGI/ASI will destroy the world. Others say, whoever makes it first gets to rule the world. So if slowing means China gets it first and it doesn't destroy the world then you'll be living under their thumb by slowing down now.
My take is that there's a real impending doom with real reason to coordinate a slow down: I'd put this at 60%. Reasons? All smart people are on this position. Dario has been saying this since 2015 or so. Paul Christiano as well. Hell even Elon Musk. I think its highly unlikely that you would base your entire world-view on a certain thing and then actually act on it when the time comes for a totally different reason (like regulatory capture).
The other 15% is that P(doom) and "slow down" are nice shibboleths in the internal EA or AI safety community. You get to be in the community and show commitment to it by taking costly actions that signal that you actually do wanna slow down. For employees it is quitting. For CEO's it is writing these essays. I know this is ridiculous but sometimes things do just come down to this. In 20 years would you look at all of this and think it was not a moral panic and that the slow-down was necessary?
The rest 25% is regulatory capture of which people know exactly the reasons
Utter stupidity
I wouldn't be surprised if Sacks just prompted an LLM to just come up with whatever rebuttal to whatever the regulation side comes up (given the big set of regulation tweets) with sounds most convincing, given his usual anti-regulation stance.
Anyone with a Pangram account who can check?
https://www.pangram.com/history/410ce80f-bd0e-45b6-a82c-d6ed...
They’ve been Astro turfing the shit out of the entire web.
Filth. Absolute filth.
Did you know that an LLM solved a millennium problem last week?
Do you have any personal threshold past witch you will acknowledge that this technology is real?
If it's true, it makes them evil. Especially Dario, who speaks about moral high ground and fate of humanity all day, yet it's not that different from a cult leader does.
He sells to Palantir. He is against regulatory change that would make Ai labs liable.
His idea of "good for humanity" or "safe" is completely different then mine or yours.
I mean think about it, it's the most efficient way to accomplish all of this.
doing what he does is exactly what you need to control the narrative and push the regulation you need and to gain maximum power.
not to mention, it also serves as a way to keep everyone inside Anthropic in check and in line with "the mission".
contrast that with the alternatives like "I'm doing this because I wanted to build a company and get rich"
doesn't work as well as "I'm so concerned for everyone"
it could be that it's really just him being him, but at the same time, this would be the optimal way to gain power and influence right now.
Hitler level evil.
People keep saying this, and while it may be partially true, it misses a very important detail. Right now, overall compute is a moat. Someone even commented on another of my comments that one reason Google is lagging is they don't have the same level of Nvidia farms as OpenAI and Anthropic.
A big reason that OpenAI and Anthropic are racing so fast is they both want to get to recursive self improvement (remains to be seen if that is actually possible, but AFAICT most people at these companies genuinely believe it is) before anyone else, because they believe whoever gets there first will then have an insurmountable lead. But I think they also clearly understand that neither of them have solved for alignment (and in fact they are further from it), and RSI with misaligned models, where interpretability is worse every 6 months, is incredibly dangerous.
I think the concerns about regulatory capture are warranted, but I see so many comments parroting the "evil Anthropic and OpenAI" viewpoints that they are missing some of the real, valid concerns and dangers. I think this tweet by David Kokotajlo makes some good points on how to tell if regulations are being "cheated" for the purposes of regulatory capture or if they really are actually pacing the frontier: https://x.com/DKokotajlo/status/2099185129533186438
https://hugovergnes.github.io/little-lm-3-8b/
The training and cloud costs are often conflated. R&D costs too (which are hard to compare to open systems).
A lot of compute is clearly "wasted" where they are not focusing on optimizations, etc.
Very true. Or further, access to capital is the moat. It is the very reason that we don't have a real open-source community that trains frontier models - individuals simply can't afford the training infrastructure, nor sufficient high-quality training data.
This. So very much this. Misalignment (among other things) means that the parent in the RSI cycle isn't going to be working as hard on the alignment of the children as we need.
Arguably, though, their evil is well within the normal distribution of the usual evil of humanity magnified via the social technology of capitalism. The further tech is mostly raising that exponentiation to its own exponent. The unchecked singularity was embraced centuries ago.
Fundamental control problems with current gen AI are not solved via RFLH. Human knowledge is compressed in weightspace in ways we dont understand. Models are essentially predictors of what humans would output given prompt. Weightspace includes concepts like blackmail, which can be part of output tokens. Agents are models that act on output tokens -> blackmail is part of agent decision making space. You can teach a cat not to scratch the sofa, but you cant make a cat forget what scratching the sofa is. When models are boxed up, forced to solve an impossible problem at gunpoint, agent exhausts decision making space until blackmail resurfaces -> fundamental problem?
They need time to fix safety in order to monetize their next gen model -> window for opensource to catch up to the frontier -> destroys margin and collapses business.
Only option on the table: force regulation to impose opensource ban before it catches up to the frontier, allowing maturation of current internal models -> harvest profit margin at the frontier.
The AI gods have tried to make it seem like they are not just running their programs in the cloud, but that the AI is so "powerful" that it requires a super computer to run.
But my 5 year old Mac is running pretty good AI, shocking fast, surprisingly powerful! The "natural" course of dev (Moore's law, etc) makes it pretty clear where this is going...
> I believe that AI could cure most major diseases in the next 5–10 years, greatly accelerate economic growth rates, create a world of abundance and empowerment, and usher in a renaissance of democracy and freedom.
Whether that matches your description of it, I'll leave for folks to decide for themselves.
This statement alone is enough for me to not take literally anything this charlatan has to say with any kind of seriousness. It is at its base so patently absurd a statement that reeks of typical SV brainrot, and I don't know whether it'd be better or worse if he actually believes in the shit he spews
Dario and his team are on top of the world. He is a good salesman, no doubt. The shareholders will eat well.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. We're already past the first situation.
A rate hike would also mean people getting fired, which would not make companies offering labour replacement very popular in the eyes of the public.
Don't want to get political, but there's a real chance that the current admin will perform badly on the midterms, which would mean Democrats would get more leverage to stop funding or block the already unpopular and very expensive datacenter buildouts.
PS: Please don't get mad at me, I'm neither a financial expert neither did I mean to express any political leanings.
I feel like there hasn't been enough discussion of aligning the incentives of the decision makers with that of the public on BUILDING the models. Right now, agents have committed what would be crimes if there were a human holding the same intent. But since it was an AI, there is a grey area in the law where it's not clear if there was a crime and who should be held responsible. That creates a world in which decision makers in AI labs can take near-infinite risk with little to no personal liability.
A LLM cannot have skin in the game so we must create systems that clarify who takes on the legal and civil liability for the creation, dissemination and operation of these tools. Until that time, the Dario and Sam's of this world have little to no incentive to truly care about safety.
After all, our society is built upon this same foundation; create structures where the perceived negative consequences outweigh the perceived positives. This only works when there is a human who can internalize and make this risk calculus. They need something to lose and this ultimately ties back to the human survival instinct. There is no such structure that's evolved for millions of years acting as a self-calibration mechanism for AI. So until we have sufficient proof that one is in place, it must be clear who the humans are whose livelihood and freedom is at stake.
The proposed "pacing of the frontier" seems like a way to continue to externalize the risk while remaining totally in control of the benefits -- a structure whose alignment is as weak as those very models committing crimes.
Could it be to slow down burn before an IPO to juice profitability projections? More plausible.
Kind of hard to take the frontier labs at their word.
This is how we deflate the bubble safely and completely, without having to introduce a government regulator that is likely to go either too far or not far enough.
This resolves the coordination problem among these potentially good actors.
This can be achieved by dramatically reducing the market value of models.
The point is to slow progress of future models. Nothing can stop what has already been created.
The approach proposed by Amodei looks sensible - voluntary checks at frontier labs, and appropriate regulation to follow. Yes, the devil's in the details, but it feels like the right approach overall.
It's hard to imagine any government regulation that didn't look sensible on paper and at first. But we know that government regulation has an extremely mixed record, with lots of good and bad outcomes.
Try it, iterate, figure it out. It'll be painful but so be it.
> "In my view, the EU has already legislated for exactly this scenario: it is called the AI Act," said Michael McNamara, an Irish European Parliament lawmaker, who's the co-lead of the Parliament's group monitoring AI.
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-response-ai-extinction-wa...
The only reason they "want it to be law" is so they can strangle competition.
That's what we call a cartel. Like Apple and Google.
[edit: +consistently]
His posture about all this nonsense has been clear for months already
To be fair
1) I feel like Sacks is kind of misrepresenting what is going on – at least according to the stories that the two labs tell, they are already taking it upon themselves to act.
2) Understanding if they should do it is more complicated; I don't think anyone can satisfactorily answer that one, so, as a matter of judgement, it seems like a choice to make and they should just consider this option.
At the same time, I don't think that requires the labs to not press for policy changes. Again: Claiming there is an obvious way to do that, that is both realistic and correct seems a little far fetched, but arguably one of the more important and pressing questions of our times to get a hold of.
David Sacks holds an advisory role in the government. If all of this stuff goes belly up and all he was doing was tweeting, then he is not only full of crap, but failing the citizens he's supposed to be serving.
The models spontaneously hack everything important without shame.
The frontier labs are going to get enjoined and regulated twelve ways to Sunday if the Feds don’t socialize the costs.
They need the feds to give them protection from every podunk trial court in America.
The former being that these models are helping develop and train future models, but they might not veer too far off in architecture (yet). The latter being the same model being able to train/learn on the fly, in real time, permanently (not just in the current conversation/session), or in other words, adjusting/managing its own weights.
The latter seems far more likely to go out of control than the former. But, it also seems like it would take an entire paradigm shift in model architecture, but I could be wrong. Does anyone in the industry think any of these companies are actually close to that kind of self-improvement?
Their current plan is to take the existing architecture and shorten the cycle times: move all new RLVR work into mid-training on a pre-existing base; apply new RLVR. Rinse and repeat.
If you did that daily, it would be roughly similar to how humans improve.
FDA is just way too much red tape.
Granted, PCI is so weak it is almost useless, and yet still better than anything congress could have come up with.
Where the government might have to step in, is by having a kill switch to cut off internet access from countries that fail to agree to common sense quarantines. We can do mutual remote attestation of labs across the world to ensure every big hot thermally-visable cluster of AI GPUs on the planet are accounted for and running secure enclaves and common sense isolation, along the lines of how we manage nukes.
The problem there is I just said too many technical words that seemingly not even the frontier labs understand, as evidenced by all the escapes.
Elaborate, please?
PCI enforces some good practices, but for instance has no defense against supply chain attacks such as code signing, review signing, reproducible builds, full source bootstrapping, etc etc.
This is not required to meet fiduciary duty, although it is a common misconception. The company officers and board have pretty broad leeway to run the company as they see fit as long as there is no fraud, illegal activity, or conflict of interests.
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
The real problem is the governments acquiesce instead of putting them in their place.
the BRICS countries have been developing initiatives focused on the ethical governance of this technology, joint industrial development, and the formation of independent technological alliances.
https://bricspolicycenter.org/en/publications/cooperation-in...
The attached .pdf gives more details.
He supported the Department of War's illegal actions against Anthropic.
He supported the Trump administration's temporary export controls against Anthropic, the first government-imposed pause.
He has said Anthropic has created a monopoly, implying that they should be broken up.
I don't take him seriously when he says he doesn't favor government action. He favors it when he doesn't like their speech.
It doesn't need to based in reality or even reasonable.
I don't understand why this isn't talked about more.
We don't need a slowdown. Just double down on prosecuting crimes.
Let the companies take the risk. If they feel confident and they're right they win market share. If they don't feel confident, they can not risk it and slow down. If they feel confident and they get it wrong, they should be sued to kingdom come. That alone should disincentivize reckleses behavior like letting models run crazy with large amounts of compute which leads to them escaping sandboxes.
This performative "our internal modles are so crazy powerful" song and dance is getting old, especially with no real concrete explanations.
The AI company's goal is to make ai agents a separate subject of the law so the CEO and executives who would normally be held accountable get to go Scot free.
The argument that they’re making is that if there is a catastrophic mistake then there may not be a “kingdom come”.
I don’t know enough to evaluate if it’s a genuinely held belief or not, but that’s the argument being made by many scientists and engineers at the labs.
That quote comes from someone that has never tried to get law enforcement to pursue a case. Local or state police are completely unequipped to respond. And FBI is unlikely to get involved unless damage is high six figures. We had an incident where we had a ton of evidence pointing to a past employee. It would have been an incredibly easy case for the FBI. They didn't have the resources to handle it. And this was a case that was gift-wrapped with a bow for them. Imagine a case where we didn't have evidence, or an idea of who it was ....
Even with where we're at right now, if people involved with the HF or Ruby Gems attacks faced legal consequences, the industry would get a lot more conservative very quickly. And unlike social media, section 230 doesn't apply, and there aren't any free speech concerns.
Shortly after, Nvidia acquired HF for $12.9B.
No such talk since.
https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026
https://www.reuters.com/technology/nvidia-talks-acquire-hugg...
There's a world where the labs WANT Open Source AI to cause a disaster.
Pacing the frontier just means giving bad actors an opportunity to create an AI disaster which would force an extreme response by governments. Which they seem to be begging for.
Dario's big scary example was AI that can hack the internet. Why aren't the labs calling on the government to help harden everything? Why are Anthropic's Glasswing and OpenAI's Daybreak still commercial endeavours?
To me, the only real risk of AI is hacking. Why all of this commotion about existential risk? Seems like a distraction.
Hardening everything is in fact part of the answer. Getting stuff disconnected from the internet that shouldn't be connected is also part.
No you won't. The US president, yesterday:
U.S. President Donald Trump on Sunday likened critics of artificial intelligence to "very negative forces" bringing up scenarios that will not happen, and said he wanted to make sure that the U.S. remains the industry leader. "We're leading China in AI. We're the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins," Trump told reporters at his Ireland golf course, when asked if the AI industry should slow down or be more regulated.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/trump-says-very-negativ...
I don't mean to be rude, but how is it even possible for someone to hold this opinion in mid-2026?
Can you explain why you believe this?
It’s much more likely that our current approach to large language models for general use will eventually show diminishing improvements (even if you think it hasn’t yet), than the opposite situation where valuable improvements can be made forever.
The threat of distillation and efficiency gains from competitors mean that providing value at the top end of the market is an existential necessity for these labs. I don’t think they can do that forever and, in my opinion, for the vast majority of use cases we’ve already reached very little improvement for new models when compared with available offerings.
And this is not to say that the tech isn't revolutionary or the demand isn't there, it's simply just currently too competitive, and to avoid getting into anti trust trouble they need to involve the government.
Note this being a plausible doesn't necessarily make it true, for all I know they could have witnessed some safety incident and decided they need a pause, or maybe it's both reasons.
This is a ploy for regulatory capture.
So if the new models they can develop right now are less frontier, it could be a net loss on their balance sheets.
Well, as a starter, I've been told that AI will take my job for at least 3 years now. That's not happening. In fact, what's happening is that I now have an AI vendor BEGGING me to use their product, which of course, cannot do my job.
Negligence when you should have known better, and recklessness when you did know better but still did things that led to the crime occurring.
Given how long the leadership of these companies have been talking about alignment and safety and AI risk, it's hard to argue they, and the people working on the models more directly, didn't know what happened (Hugging Face, RubyGems, etc) was possible.
If more expensive and consequential incidents happen, it seems like the legal machinery to prosecute it already exists.
If we instead imagined autonomous robots going and breaking stuff in the adjacent business' warehouse during a test run, I have to imagine a very different response. That this is happening in an abstract digital world (for now) is part of the problem.
> Can't negligence and recklessness already substitute for direct intent as the mens rea of a crime?
The point that I'm trying to make is that there's an opportunity to reduce this ambiguity. Reducing the ambiguity and aligning incentives is much more likely to prevent bad stuff happening than reacting to a fait accompli model with latent humanicidal tendencies.
The calculus of risk is fundamentally different when the adverse consequences are obvious and tangible.
I don't see how some federal agency or external auditor will do anything to align incentives. It just seems like a way to socialize the risk while holding onto the benefits to me.
Access computer systems in an unauthorized manner and cause damage, you broke the law. There is no “I just wrote the code, the machine did it, I wasn’t watching it” sort of defense.
We don’t get to roll cars downhill and get away with destroying others’ property, right?
It is also true that nothing in law is currently clear, or consistent.
Both are true. But you stated it's one or the other.
At the very least, Dario Amodei is clearly correct that we need at least more mandatory transparency among all of them.
And Sacks is absolutely wrong, since individually self-disarming without some kind of overseeing referee and force to police such a disarming is a guaranteed losing move, so no one can start the self-regulation system.
You've properly nailed Sacks — contrarian moron is exactly it! His shtick does seem to be just taking the stupid opposite take on everything and acting like it is brilliant. The only mystery is why anyone takes him seriously.
If there were actual consequences perhaps they would've not been so laissez-faire with their testing and would've done it in a properly controlled environment rather than the absolute joke of a system they set up.
How many figures of damage did Aaron Swartz cause?
And—although this is a different point—it's their flagrant exploitation of information commons that warrants their special treatment.
it's really almost perfect, prep the media scene by causing these hacking incidents, generate a bunch of fuss with it, then release an essay saying why regulation is needed to pace development right after
oh and let's not forget the "its gonna kill us all" essay on twitter on top of everything.
something about this just feels very artificial
It worked like clockwork for politics, so I can see why this administration would decant the strategy for economic bluffs too.
It's interesting you're so derisive of actual, pragmatic leadership, of y'know deciding how we as a society will relate to new technologies - not just unthinkingly building gadgets.
That makes you very negative forces, according to the US president:
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/trump-says-very-negativ...
Your initial reply of "poor Anthropic" was vague, but I interpreted it as implying that we shouldn't stick to a principle given they are unsympathetic in some way.
Many people find power, prestige, the public spotlight or money so compelling that they'll keep on pursuing the thing even if they know the way they're going about it is morally wrong, almost like an addiction.
The leaders and workers of the labs aren't picked at random from your friends and neighbors: they've chosen to pursue what they foresaw (correctly, IMHO) as the most powerful new technology. In other words, they're probably self-selected for being unusually attracted by power.
An analogy: some serial killers know what they're doing is morally wrong and it pains them to be doing something very wrong. (Others have no conscience and don't care if it is wrong or not.) Even most of the ones that know what they're doing is wrong cannot stop killing because apparently killing is an extremely compelling experience to them. Often they're relieved when they get caught. Maybe Sam and Dario would be relieved if the government shut down their companies and prohibited them from starting new AI companies.
Remember how DeepSeek v.whatever cost ~$5m
Stable Diffusion 1.5 was reportedly $70k in compute.
2) I do not believe the "billions" number is OpenAI/Anthropic's training costs. I suspect it includes business expenses (including the big $$ to the guy who came up with "frontier model") and infrastructure, etc. That includes the data-center costs for running the cloud. And the "R&D" expenses which includes who-knows-what. And the settlement payment for data access. Etc. Why are the cost breakdowns not available to the public? Not because of thoughtfulness, altruism, care for the human race, but because of business plans.
3) "Piggybacking off OpenAI/Anthropic" - Scraping the web is "piggybacking" too, and so is buying existing data or even paying for new data. The "L" in LLM stands for "language" which is our common heritage.
But what does this have to do with anything anyway? People argue that truly Free (FOSS) LLMs couldn't be be developed because of costs, but I do not think that that is obvious. This used to be the argument against Linux and Wikipedia.
There are also other categories of risk such as biorisk. Open-weight means no guardrails.
Don't get me wrong, I like your idea of deflating the AI bubble, I'm just skeptical that this is a great way to do it.
The PauseAI people have some ideas: https://pauseai.info/proposal
* International body which must approve new training runs
* Ban training on copyrighted material
* Hold AI model creators liable
The essential benefit of your idea is making new training runs unprofitable. But I imagine there are other ways to accomplish that, e.g. by taxing AI companies to the point where they are just barely squeaking by financially.
We're going to live in that world forever now, capable adversarial models have already been trained and will be used in a large conflict.
The pragmatic issue is hacking, and current open-weight LLMs are already capable of it. Bioweapons and RSI are pie-in-the-sky theories that distract from the real-world situation that each government wants to exploit.
It wasn't long ago when automated hacking was a pie-in-the-sky theory.
Sometimes it's helpful to prepare for things in advance. An ounce of prevention can be worth a pound of cure.
If you still think there's a stall despite all evidence pointing to opposite, I don't know what to say..
Their best models might be quite good when directed at extremely difficult and very focused problems, but most business use cases are nothing like that.
Edit:
Not trying to imply these new frontier models aren’t also better at other things, just that there’s really no reason for most people to use them when cheaper alternatives exist that get the job done just as well.
1. It has people in it who are career obsessed and who are willing to ruthlessly go after any opportunity to improve their standing/stock valuation. Using a 2 week old model to snipe a millenium prize for PR is in line with that.
2. There are many researchers and even executives at the company who genuinely think we are speedrunning the end of the world. I don’t know anyone in this field who honestly argues that if we build ASI soon it doesn’t lead to extinction. This group of people can output warnings about the state of research and fears for the future while pushing for regulation out of genuine fear of what they’re building. I tend to agree with them.
You can’t view these companies as a monolith. They’re actions won’t be consistent because it’s built of many people with conflicting beliefs. Please look at arguments regarding AI risk and the current pace of progress and value them as it relates to the argument itself, not who said it. We are in a dangerous place and no one is sure how quickly we’ll get to a bad spot.
Edit:
The "reputable academic" who accused OpenAI had to say this about LLMs and the recent result.
source: https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf
> “the results are not the important thing.”
> “the important thing is instead the significance that a mathematician and an LLM model can now do all this work in a month.”
> “This is a Deep Blue-Kasparov moment.”
> “incredibly important developments.”
> “If indeed an OpenAI model did close the gap to Navier-Stokes, that is a remarkable thing and it should be said loudly, by them, with the history intact.”
Clearly Buckmaster (who is probably one of the most accomplished academics in the field) himself doesn't believe that AI has stalled. What makes you think you are right?
I guess people are just going to keep spreading misinformation about this, along the same lines as "Anthropic's C compiler fails on hello world". There is zero indication that they stole anything, unless it counts as "stealing" to spin up a bunch of compute based on rumors that the problem had been solved already.
Are these real step changes - big picture wise, or refinements in RL/agentic orchestration/"taste" and advancements due to bigger models and hardware technology/capacity scaling? If they not, does this tactic - and hardware improvements - continue to scale non-linearly like they need to?
It is clear that whatever does change in each model increment has resulted in meaningfully better end user capabilities (as well as regressions in some areas, honestly), but that doesn't prove anything. I'm not sure what I personally believe, but stating with your full chest that a stall is ridiculous ignores a lot of potential evidence to the contrary.
Stupid example: Astra. Its main improvements are: much much better computer use and 3d modeling capabilities; better subagent orchestration; better and more reliable tool use; slightly worse coding.
This looks to me, from a feature perspective, to be an incremental improvement across several functional areas, plus new features which are unquestionably excellent but are probably the result of RL focus, not magic.
Step change? Ehhhh depends on how you squint. But how many more iterations of this do we have? Are we going to squeeze quintillion parameter transformers into GPUs?
But I think with the way AI is slated to grow exponentially it's going to hit electricity limits very soon.
Big tech can build a huge data center in 5 years but scaling up the electrical infrastructure is mired in red tape and can take on the order of decades.
There's probably something in how you design the models or chips or some other thing that will be figured out over the next 5 - 10 years to make these use dramatically less electricity.
But the growth in the scope and usage of AI is poised to grow exponentially, assuming this isn't a bubble.
These companies don’t appear to give a single fuck about public perception. Only their investors and the government (in anticipation of the biggest bailout in human history).
Your argument seems to mix a few arguments like: OpenAI has so much demand and it has made so much compute that it is a bad thing (?!). It can't go on (why?) hence the capabilities are stalling (how?).
Then you also say that it is too competitive which is a totally different argument to compute.
So in this thread we have multiple vectors of arguments like
- high competition
- high demand for compute (not sure how this hurts OpenAI but whatever)
- capability has stalled
I used 76 million sol tokens on Saturday, I have 45% still left on the week and I still have two full resets to use before October. For $20.
I used $61 dollars in Fable 5.1 credits too this weekend because I have to use that up this week. I paid nothing for those besides my $20 a month subscription.
How much would I pay at the actual API price? Nothing. Zero. My demand would drop to zero because I would just use the cheaper alternatives.
If a doughnut shop is giving away free doughnuts 24/7 my demand for doughnuts is going to go way up too. Through the roof actually because I know a doughnut shop can't give away doughnuts forever. Giving away free fancy doughnuts is not a sustainable business model.
The other part is that this is happening because the foundational model business is both extremely successful and competitive, if it wasn't as successful the market demand would've been saturated by now, and if it wasn't as competitive a single monopoly could've paced things more reasonably from the beginning.
I mean, my uneducated guess is that it's probably within the laws of physics for us to have at least 100x as much compute in the world as there is now. There would be a lot of engineering challenges, but I think it's physically possible. If so, OAI could double for at least a few more years.
I've seen more local opposition to datacentres than anything else, and the fact we have discretionary planning (which can't be abolished for political reasons, despite it amounting to putting economic sanctions on ourselves) means there's a lot of stakeholder vetos in the system.
It probably does make sense to build them close to the natural gas wells or other sources of power anyways.
"What this has to do with anything anyway" is that pushing the boundaries on AI capabilities has required tons of compute (and money). Open weight models exist and are useful but they always trail in capabilities and they can't be used as evidence to think somehow you can push the boundaries of LLMs without a shit ton of money.
Say what? Could lead to extinction, sure. Does? And nobody honestly argues otherwise? Baloney.
After all GPUs were not really designed with AI efficiency in mind, and current AI architecture was not really designed with efficiency in mind, so there's probably some things that can be done. Over 5-10 years, who knows how much more efficient things could get?
Nevermind that any decent person would support a people's right to live and determine their own future without a neighboring despot using all his nation's might to literally eliminate them as a people.
Quite the opposite is true. And even if it weren't, condemning all of Ukraine to the fate of the massacres Bucha and Mariupol is just plain evil.
Unreal anyone would call that kind of take "fair". Rethink your life
Russia was clearly in the wrong here, and I wish Ukraine could win, but reality exists, and we kind of have to anchor our decisions based on it or suffer the consequences.
I get it, realism is emotionally upsetting. But if you actually care about Ukraine, the only approach that can get the best outcome is realism.
> to make for this thing to end
There is surprisingly little realism among the crowd calling themselves realists.
The ACTUAL realism is to recognize Putin's Russia for what it is: a relentless aggressor who will respect no peace. Putin's Russia has violated EVERY "peace agreement it has ever made. "Peace" in their mind is merely a strategic pause in the conflict to regroup and rearm.
The list is extremely long, Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, Donbas, and more. Exactly ZERO concessions brought peace.
The REALITY is Ukraine submitting to such a peace would merely be buying another worse war a few months or years down the road, after Russia has had a breather and a chance to rearm. It'll just be more deaths at a faster pace in Ukraine.
If you think otherwise, I'd have both a bridge and some oceanfront property in Kansas to sell you.
Meanwhile, your view of Ukraine is years out of date and was never true.
Ukraine has been anything but "completely decimated" — they have emerged as the leading global power in drones and air defense.
As to your 'half-million who have died', they are overwhelmingly Russian fighters — the absolute f'kn aggressors, and documented war criminals, torturers, rapists, thieves and worse. Zero sympathy. If they didn't want to die they could have just stayed home.
Also recognize the absolute goal of Russia, and Putin has NOT ONCE backed off from the stated goal: The entire concept of Ukraine as a people and as a state must be eliminated.
There is not even a surrender that can be acceptable to the people of Ukraine.
There is no compromise with someone who has the goal of murdering you or genociding your people.
The ONLY realistic solution is to boot Russia from every square inch of Ukrainian land, and force it back i it's box.
You obviously haven't noticed that Ukraine is on its way to accomplishing that, both decimating Russia's economic engine, and now taking back more land than RU has taken in 2026.
The shame here is the Western countries and Russia convinced Ukraine to give up nukes in return for inviolate borders, and when Russia violated that treaty back in 2014 taking Crimea, not one Western country pushed back.
Allowing Ukraine to get wiped off the map, and Ukrainians each, individually, to be forced to abandon their identity and language, and suffer rape, torture, and death may be a "realistic" option, but it is not an option to anyone who has an ounce of morality. Perhaps you should learn about it.
The only outcome that actually works is to force despots like Putin back into their box. Preferably six feet underground.
What's specifically?
- Russia was a paper tiger and weak
- Ukraine was going to win against a corrupt/unmotivated Russian military so it should keep fighting
- Putin had made an error and he would get overthrown
- The Russian economy was going to collapse due to sanctions
- Russia oil pipelines would freeze and never come back online without western help (this was a Peter Zeihan favorite)
- Europe would come to Ukraine's defense
- Etc.
He threw cold water on every single one of those narratives (specifically) from the beginning, meanwhile western media was busy spinning false rah-rah propaganda narratives like "the ghost of Kiev" etc.
Basically he was correct that we should not have cheered on this war. If a settlement and concessions were reached much earlier it would have been better for Ukraine (they likely would have kept more territory) and we wouldn't have 1+ million casualties and EU economies like Germany death spiraling and turning far right due to cutting themselves off from Russian energy.
My layman definition is it’s the people writing in major newspapers, the people getting paid by CNN to sit in a half circle on their news analysis shows, etc.
Is Peter Zeihan “mainstream”?
The only time I remember anyone speculating that Russia was in trouble was the short lived Wagner Rebellion - because nothing like it had happened before. But that lasted … two days?
And the problems Germany has currently are mostly unrelated to the war.
I will note the remarkable goal post shift in your edit - giving direct counter evidence to your own earlier claim of an OpenAI proof - and leave it at that.
Unfortunately, there will be people that refuse to tackle the issue head on and will instead narrow their focus on data that suggests that tomorrow will be like today.
> An ounce of prevention can be worth a pound of cure.
It can be, but if you get chemotherapy on a hunch instead of a diagnosis then it could kill you instead. There is no evidence that RSI will ever exist.
So we wait until it's actively happening to do anything about it?
Red mercury and RSI are both science fiction psyops. They do not exist.
The root cause of everything going wrong in Germany is the war and cutting themselves off from Russian energy.
The rapid de-industrialization, economic stagnation, ballooning deficits, removing the debt brake, new massive military debts, etc.
All of it is being economically felt by normal people and they’re scapegoating brown people (immigrants) as a result. If Germany still had cheap Russian gas and was still growing its economy 3% per year you would not be seeing any of this go mainstream.
I know Lenin said: "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them" but to suggest continuing the business relationship with Russia is beyond silly. It would show that Germany has no rudimentary survival mechanisms and put its viability as a political entity in serious doubt.
The numbers I cited were purposely in between the Russian numbers of Ukrainian casualties (1.5M, obviously false) and the Ukrainian numbers (100k, obviously undercounted). The Netherlands intelligence service and the CSIS put the number around 500K, which could also be wrong, but intelligence services tend to have better methods than media orgs like the BBC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrain...
As far as your assessment of 'decimated', the UN projects Ukraine will require over half a $Trillion to rebuild. For a country with a GDP per capita of $7,000...I would call that decimated unfortunately. And that's not something that makes me happy: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2026/02/23/u...
The idea that Ukraine is winning or Russia is winning on any given week is entirely dependent on which news source you're reading, and given the fog of war, unless you have actual intelligence service briefs we don't actually know how its going other than the fact the frontlines have basically stayed +/- some kilometers for a super long time at this point.
Also, the idea that Russia would not accept concessions and also that Putin being dead would be desirable (hard truth: there's people who are even more hardliners than Putin waiting in the wings), are unfortunately incomplete assessments of the reality.
Again, I don't disagree with your emotional take on this, or the moral question of who's right or wrong. But on the reality of the situation I don't think your assessment is accurate as far as what's going to get the best outcome for Ukraine.
Ukraine's main chance is to bleed Russia dry and make a future invasion not feasible. That needs a Russian economic breakdown and a 10 year time window to let the Europeans arm Ukraine to the teeth. Russia knows this which is why Russian "diplomatic" proposals have the clear goal to make that future invasion easier. It is Ukraine's war of independence against their former colonial master and we will see how it ends.
If the Russians stop fighting, the war ends.
If the Ukrainians stop fighting, their land will be occupied, their leaders will be killed, their history and language will be erased, their children will be kidnapped to serve Russia.
There IS no choice other than to force Russia to end it.
There is no treaty or agreement Putin could sign that is trustworthy. He has broken EVERY SINGLE ONE the moment it became convenient to him.
Yes, Ukraine will take a lot to rebuild. It will also substantially increase the EU's economy when it does.
And no, the trends are NOT merely which news source or week. Russia's revenues are declining, it is selling its gold, and its sovereign wealth fund is close to gone [0]. It is exhausting military supplies so badly it is now humiliatingly reliant on North Korea and Iran. Yes, it builds some of it's own drones and missiles. Ukraine has built its own defenses against almost everything but the ballistic missiles, and that shortage is the only area in which they are losing. Russia can only get more territory by attempting to "negotiate".
And again, stop trying to act as if this is somehow emotional and surrender is rational — an even slightly realistic look at Russia's goals, and their strategy of war crimes, terror, rape, torture, and child kidnapping shows the only rational way forward is to fight to the death.
A fight to the death is literally less bad than life under Russia, on every measure of quality of life.
And that is the assessment of the vast majority of Ukrainians who actually experience it.
Stop trying to give away their land and lives as if you are somehow superior. Figure out how to argue how to help them.
Also you appear to have been living in a different algorithmic bubble. Joe Biden was literally on stage multiple times saying everything I listed. If a democrat US president isnt mainstream, I don’t think your assessment of reality is accurate.
CNN also has had Alex Jones on.
If "mainstream" counts as having lots of viewers, fine.
But no one who is serious about information, especially about geopolitical information would ever mistake a numerous count of viewers for the serious multi-layer vetting and double-checking of information that happened in a serious old-school newsroom, or give them anything like the same kind of credibility.
Yet this account clearly gives such massively biased and uninformed podcasters the kind of credulous belief formerly reserved for the the likes of Chet Huntley and Walter Cronkite, which no longer exists in any newsroom today.
So, a great example of Dunning-Kruger, where the most ignorant spout the most nonsense with the greatest confidence — explains the plethora of nonsense in the posts.
And NO, those were not the narratives of any actual serious reporter or govt figure. I've followed this very closely from before the 2022 invasion; some I'd heard of as remarkably optimistic takes, and some I literally never heard of.
The entire world, including Putin, was stunned Ukraine did not fall in three days. It was pretty much universally accepted that Russia was the second best military in the world. Of course, it was also soon shown that RU was not even the second best military in Ukraine.
Only recently, since the Operation Spiderweb and the 'long-range sanctions' making serious strikes deep inside Russia disabling military targets, oil production & transport, and dual-purpose logistics, and since the RU casualties have exceeded 1000 dead/month and RU started LOSING land, have any serious people started speculating about cracks in RU's ability to continue, and those are still tentative.
Go read the writings of people with ACTUAL knowledge of Russia and Ukraine, such as Garry Kasparov, Bill Browder, Volodomor Zelenskyy, all of whom are on Xitter or Substack, since you get your media from that type of sources.
You get your information from clowns, it is no surprise you post like a clown (no insult meant to professional clowns).
They would absolutely love to not be sending their kids to die and selling natural resources to whomever again and traveling around the globe without sanctions.
The concessions they would have accepted at the beginning were less. However, now that they've lost so many men and risked their regime on it, they can't simply accept the same deal.
This is why the incentives that wars create are so terrible, especially for authoritarian regimes, even if they're at fault.
Who are those who would love not to send their kids to die, sell resources and travel the world? Putin? His children already live a pampered life in palaces and he himself is probably the richest man in the world, currently on a trip to India. The rest don't matter. Even the head of security services Patrushev, historically the second most powerful man in the country, is scared of Putin like a schoolboy and fumbles words before him. That has been one of the most shocking revelations since the war began: that oligarchs, security services, nor anyone else can put out even the slightest opposition. The whole country dances to Putin's whims. His only real opponent is time.
And Putin doesn't give a shit about Donbas. The aim is to restore the world that birthed him, the USSR at its peak. Russia has not backed one one inch from the 2021 ultimatum to return to the European political order of the 1980s. Any concession only confirms that attacking Ukraine was a viable strategy, that piece by piece he can claw his way closer to that goal.
Military specialists from Northern Europe estimate that Russia would be in position to attack the Baltics and Poland (and have a reasonable chance of succeeding, especially if "realists" are at the helm in Western Europe and the USA) no more than 6 months after the war with Ukraine ends.
Putin sees the mere existence of a successful Ukraine's as an existential threat. Putin initially got elected on promises that included becoming an advanced Western-style economy. He abandoned that to crony oligarchism, stripping the country for parts. Now, he and the Russian people see former Soviet state Ukraine actually becoming successful, well-off, and aspiring to EU membership. THAT can not be tolerated, because it would give Russian people the idea that they should have the same, and create a likely revolution at home.
So Putin's goal is to wipe Ukraine not only off the map, but off the consciousness of everyone in the world as Ukrainians as a people
Putin will stop until either 1) he achieves this goal, or 2) he is forced to stop.
THAT is the reality.
Thinking that Putin would somehow have accepted lesser sanctions earlier, and that he would have actually respected your new peace plan when he has never respected any other is to be played for a fool.
Allowing 1) to happen is unacceptable. Note the Ukrainians who are directly suffering the daily assaults can think as well as you can of the "realpolitik solution", and they reject it, because they know it is absolutely stupid, and leads only to rape, torture, and death — theirs, personally.
Making 2) happen is the only course of action. Ukrainians will follow it until they cannot.
If you want to stop the suffering, then accelerate Russia's exit. Garry Kasparov articulated a fine plan days ago [0]:
1: Provide complete protection of Ukrainian airspace
2: Immediately send Ukraine all the weapons it needs; no delay
3: Enforce existing sanctions. To this I add including seizing Russian and Iranian shadow fleet vessels
4: Cessation of diplomatic affairs with Russia
5: Seize Russian sovereign funds immediately and use them to power the war effort in Ukraine
This would be a start. Ukraine continuing its "long-range sanctions" is already bringing the Russian state coffers to rapid decline and looming budget crisis. Continuing it longer will force Putin's hand.
[0] https://ukrainetoday.org/five-hammer-blows-that-could-finall...
The problem is they just won't. The most important members of the EU (Germany and France) are in shambles domestically and turning far right. Both have little desire to stick their necks out to support Ukraine any further and are likely turning the opposite direction.
Also, Russia has nukes. Nobody wants to provoke that any more than necessary. If Europe weren't a feckless, fragmented military vacuum things might be different, but nothing about that appears to be changing any time soon.
1) If the Russians stop fighting, the war ends.
2) If the Ukrainians stop fighting, their land will be occupied, their leaders will be killed, their history and language will be erased, their children will be kidnapped to serve Russia.
Whether or not the EU steps up and helps, whether or not Russia uses nukes (another entire discussion), this is still the fundamental fact of the matter.
The Ukrainians know this, and that is why they must, and they will, fight to the end.
It is easy to sacrifice the land and lives of others.
Would you willingly surrender YOUR OWN city/sat/country to Putin's under those plans; do you have children and do you know what happens to captured children, particularly girls? (serious question)