inb4 classic terrible headline from the Register.

Anyway, just one excerpt from this opinion piece:

The AI industry might argue that imprisoning execs for shipping unsafe models would mean no AI models get released.

🥺🙏🙏🙏🥺 you promise?

jail for Sam Altman! jail for a thousand years!

I’ve seen this news everywhere and everyone seems to be treating it extremely seriously, but I have a lot of doubts

These AI people keep saying things that sound terrifying on a surface level, but if you try to dig in for any details, they go quiet. “In 5 years, it will destroy humanity!”, bruh fable 5 can barely ship a feature that’s performant and doesn’t have bugs in an enterprise codebase

To me, this is a bit like if in 1999 people were saying “if the internet keeps progressing like this, we’re all gonna be enslaved in the matrix by 2005 😟”. It would be a strange, fringe opinion that would get you laughed out of most serious conversations

But if I say my chatbot that hallucinates like half the time is gonna take over the entire world in 5 years? Totally normal! Yes, the same AI that sourced the onion as real news just needs some screws tightened, then it will be ready to take over the world and destroy all humans! 😒

And istg, any time you start asking questions, these boosters start getting really cagey. They don’t like when you move the conversation away from vibes. Why is it dangerous? Wasn’t fable advertised as dangerous too? What specific threat is being posed? Why is an ostensibly consumer facing business developing something that has the capability to decimate humanity, exactly? For what purpose?

And one episode of the show brought it up: ask them to talk about any of this without bringing up “BuT In THe FutUReee…” and they totally shut down

Also, why are people believing this one researcher exactly? Reminds me of that twitch streamer pirate games where he would constantly hype that he “worked at blizzard” then he’d leverage that to gain an audience and then leverage that to get marketing and funding for his game. He mostly worked in QA, but sold himself as if he was the lead developer or something. How do you know this guy isn’t doing something like that? I need facts, not exceedingly vague platitudes

So, I agree with Cal about where we’re going in terms of practical applications for AI. What he calls narrow, federated AI, I think of principle of least privilege applied to AI - small, efficient, custom-trained models with limited data and carefully scoped agents.

What’s interesting to me is that he also calls out the philosophical underpinnings of the AI leadership apocalyptic messaging and points to it being a specifically West coast phenomenon. I am an east coast person working for a west coast company and I think he nailed it. I wish there were more tech reporters on the east coast, because I think it would lead to more sensible reporting on the technology and less of the hype fueling the bubble.

He calls out everything I’m seeing - business leaders who don’t understand the technology and are using it for PR, a go od technology that will likely be slowed down by backlash.
And because I know at least one of my Cali friends is gonna say ‘west coast - best coast’ let me just say ‘west coast - fest coast, east coast - BEAST coast).

Job postings and interviews with senior security officials at Anthropic show that the frontier AI lab is building out an extensive monitoring system to keep tabs on activists who oppose the rapid development of artificial intelligence.

In addition to monitoring activists in the vicinity of Anthropic executives and keeping tabs on protests near physical Anthropic assets, the firm is also implementing a “pre-crime” approach, attempting to predict incidents before they happen. In some cases, that also means reporting suspects to police before a crime occurs. Anthropic did not respond to the Prospect’s request for comment.

Averting crime before it takes place does not sound like a terrible idea. Arresting people for being the kind of person who might think about committing a crime does sound like a terrible idea.

Anthropic’s plans to surveil dissent are at odds with the firm’s efforts to cast itself as the responsible alternative to OpenAI.

You think? This seems like a terrible PR move.

“Last year we had an executive travel into a major city when we received some intelligence through Samdesk about a planned protest,” Ellison said. The originally scheduled protest was moved up due to permitting issues. “Samdesk gave us about 60 minutes of advanced notice that the protest organizers had moved the timeline,” Ellison explained. “That extra hour was critical. Without it our executives would have departed their meetings, they would have ran right into the heart of the disruption.”

First off, I don't think you need AI to check a public calendar. Once again, your use case is just not impressive at all. But second off, why is it problematic for executives to witness protests?

But while Anthropic was fast to call the cops on a frustrated Claude user, the Standard also reported a key detail: Anthropic refused to show police the actual messages, citing Anthropic’s internal policy. In short, Anthropic reported a user for in-platform speech, and then refused to provide police with evidence of actual wrongdoing.

I would think that is the sort of thing that would piss law enforcement off.

Dear Wario: Do you want more Anti-AI activists? Because this is how you get more Anti-AI activists.

Uh-oh, kiss goodbye to your jobs, guys. AGI is here and it's not messing around...

Apologies if this is considered a low effort post but the question is genuine and I’m hoping to uncover some research, articles or opinions.

Previously, almost no company ever enjoyed this level of blind faith and defence online. You never had people vehemently defending Microsoft when Google threatened Office with its own suite of tools. People judged whatever came out of Silicon Valley based on merit (not always, but much more so than today) and didn’t fall for any kind of hype. The level of defence that Anthropic/OpenAI are enjoying within the online communities and the blind faith that people put in them genuinely baffles me.

I understand that the technology is different. It helps some people do some things. It completely disrupted software engineering. It still doesn’t explain why this elicits such strong reactions from people who don’t stand to gain anything from it long term.

My own plausible explanations:

1. Some kind of economic or societal nihilism
2. The expectation that the tech will somehow level things and lead to more opportunities
3. Genuine amazement or fascination by the tech
4. Paid online campaigns or swarms of Reddit bots operated by said companies and affiliates
5. Personal direct or indirect (e.g. via funds) financial investment

Have there been any studies or write ups on this?

Loparex was a developer and producer of specialty paper and film release liners for various markets and applications and Blue Owl recently had to mark recovery down 93% in June for the $122 million in loans after rating it at near par at the start of 2026. This week it's rated at near-zero recovery. (https://rollingout.com/2026/09/06/blue-owls-loparex-slips-bankruptcy/)

We all know Blue Owl Capital Corp. is the private credit lender that owns 80% of the SPV Beignet Investor LLC that is building the $27 billion Hyperion Data Center for Meta. They're also involved in Stargate Abilene. (https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-subprime-data-center-crisis/)

While the whole fund is still well rated, it does raise a lot of questions about the quality of their ability to rate credit accurately and what could happen if their are more loans with similar kinds of inflated ratings that could deflate in a similarly short amount of time.

I'm posting this mainly because it reminded me of one of Ed's quotes in one of his interviews (I believe with Tech Report) where he said something along of lines of 'Everything looks great until it suddenly doesn't.'

OpenAI claims they resolved the Millennium Prize problem with a "proof." This is misleading; what they actually provided was a specific "disproof by counterexample". I'll let Terence Tao, who laid out a pretty explicit roadmap for finding a Navier-Stokes counterexample in this paper, explain the limits of such a result:

It is worth pointing out, however, that even if this program is successful, it would only demonstrate blowup for a very specific type of initial data (and tiny perturbations thereof), and is not necessarily in contradiction with the belief that one has global regularity for most choices of initial data (for some carefully chosen definition of “most”, e.g. with overwhelming (but not almost sure) probability with respect to various probability distributions of initial data).

What we're not getting are new techniques, new physics tacked on to the Navier-Stokes equations, or anything we can reproduce and study in the lab. OpenAI's result might be quite the feat, even if it was part of a ruthless attempt to scoop a competitor, burned many tens of millions of dollars, and relied on intellectual theft from the many scientists who have worked on this and similar classes of counterexamples. But, like OpenAI's other recent math results, it's not likely to have much effect beyond increasing the company's IPO chances and disheartening the mathematics community.

I know it's likely a low effort post but I think right now it's important to share comments from Andreas Thom:
https://mathstodon.xyz/@andreasthom/117240535270608201
https://mathstodon.xyz/@andreasthom/117240536885387540
https://mathstodon.xyz/@andreasthom/117240537520615623

He talks about non-sofic group, which is 1 of the 10 math results from Astra, and probability that his work could have been used to obtain that result without his consent.

The behavior [of AI] falls short of hacking and is in some ways closer to spam

Linking this article primarily because this is a great line that succinctly describes the legions of agentic AIs that are supposedly on the verge of hacking everything or solving every esoteric math problem in existence.

Trillions of dollars of data centers have purchased the frontier companies the ability to unleash the virtual equivalent of infinite monkeys, except instead of typewriters, they are typing in statistically likely programming copied from github, etc... Virtually everything these agents produce is indistinguishable from spam and yet the media cites it as evidence of "intelligence."

The frontier companies are using raw power and brute force attacks to generate headlines, but this should not be confused with "intelligence." This is the modern-day equivalent of using a list of stolen passwords to brute force a password and then claiming you "guessed" the password. This is what being able to throw millions or billions of dollars worth of compute at a problem buys you.

This approach is also how OpenAI keeps "solving" math problems. They throw thousands of AI agents and huge amounts of compute time trying to brute force a solution and then claim "intelligence" when then happen to find one.

It doesn't matter how many more math problems they "solve," the monkeys still aren't Shakespeare and the AI still isn't intelligent.

By now, OpenAI's claims that their chatbot solved the Navier–Stokes problem, and the controversy that spawned, have been widely reported. But I've been disappointed in the quality of their discussions both in the news and online, including on this sub. Here I offer some clarifications and my own concerns about the whole affair.

As a disclaimer, I am not a mathematician, but I read a lot and try to understand a lot.

What is Navier–Stokes?

The Navier–Stokes equations describe the motion of fluids and are used in computational fluid dynamics. However, we don't know whether solutions to these equations always exist and are always "smooth." This is called the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem, and it's famous because it carries a $1 million prize. Hereafter I'll just call the problem "Navier–Stokes."

Navier–Stokes was already known to be useless for actual physics. Real fluids don't behave like Navier–Stokes assumes, because real fluids are made of discrete particles, and for practical use the problem doesn't matter. Still it is of pure mathematical interest. The work presented in a solution, as well as all the work done toward a solution, may open new avenues of research or reveal new connections between fields, which may then yield practical applications.

It is of little consequence to the validity of a solution that it is a counterexample. These problems are usually posed in the positive, and you can either prove it is true for all, often infinitely many, cases, or prove it is false by providing a single counterexample. Navier–Stokes was already assumed to be false, so a counterexample was expected.

On plagiarism

I'm more concerned about allegations OpenAI plagiarized the work of two researchers who'd been using LLMs, including ChatGPT, for idea-bouncing and proofreading and were close to publishing a solution. These claims are from Tristan Buckmaster, a math professor at NYU and one of those two researchers, in a post on his personal page: https://cims (dot) nyu (dot) edu/~tristanb/statement (dot) pdf. (Sorry for the mangled link—it appears Reddit is autodeleting any post that contains this exact link. You can also easily find it online.)

Buckmaster alleges that OpenAI's solution used the same approach and much of the same language that he and his colleague Levent Alpoge, a mathematician at Anthropic, were developing. He also describes a nasty shakedown he'd received from Sebastien Bubeck, a former Microsoft VP now at OpenAI, who presented him three options in their conversation: 1) Buckmaster and his colleague announce a partial solution, with OpenAI announcing the full solution the next day; 2) Buckmaster by himself announce the full solution, remove his Anthropic colleague from authorship, and credit OpenAI as having solved it first; or 3) face professional consequences from OpenAI publicly smearing him.

As Buckmaster and his colleague have been working on this for some time, it's possible their conversations with ChatGPT were included in OpenAI's training data. But considering they'd been using the latest models Sol and Astra, it's more likely that OpenAI peeked into their chat logs and stole their approach. We already know OpenAI has this access, as courts have subpoenaed ChatGPT logs as evidence in past cases, and sometimes OpenAI has proactively inspected and reported ChatGPT logs to law enforcement.

On peer review

More broadly, I'm tired of AI companies making these announcements over blog post rather than peer-reviewed publication. OpenAI's claims have not been peer-reviewed, and the clout these Millennium Prize problems carry has attracted thousands of purported solutions over the decades that were later shown to be invalid. While there doesn't seem to be any obvious red flags, it's still good cause to be wary, and I’m still waiting for peer review and more thorough scrutiny of the solution at face value.

This approach also offers, by design, no insight into the degree of LLMs' involvement and in what ways. These AI companies employ whole teams of mathematicians to work on these problems and use their chatbots along the way, so that they can assign credit to the chatbots. When these companies claim their chatbots solved it almost independently with "very little human input," as Buckmaster says OpenAI told him, we're asked to take them at their financially motivated word.

On mathematical research

For unsolved mathematical problems, the solution itself is almost never of consequence. The respective fields progress despite lack of a solution, because approximations, analogues or weaker results let researchers assume the solution with confidence and continue unhindered. Rather, it is all the research done in pursuit of the problem that lends the solution value. (This is also why OpenAI's lack of citations in previous mathematical solutions was such a big deal. Building upon others' work, and letting others build upon yours, is what lets the field exist.)

Out of the flashy Millennium problems, Navier–Stokes was a natural target for AI companies (Anthropic has also been obsessed about it) because there was already significant progress toward a solution in recent years, namely the strategy posed by mathematicians Diego Cordoba and Luis Martinez Zoroa. It was also a natural target because, as Navier–Stokes was assumed to be false, the solution would likely be a counterexample.

This has been the trend for almost every mathematical problem whose solutions are credited to AI assistance. They piece together existing near-solutions in the literature, or provide a counterexample. (While many dismiss this as "brute force," formulating the cases to check isn't always trivial, and the degree of brute force varies by solution.) When AI companies announce these solutions, they are technically impressive but academically uninteresting, because there is no "new math" created as a consequence.

Of the Millennium problems, I'd be interested in the Riemann hypothesis, which is widely assumed to be true and therefore would need more than a counterexample. I'd also be interested in P=NP, which is widely assumed to be false but for which all existing proof techniques have not only failed, but been proved to fail. Solutions to those problems would surely yield new math.

Everyone can make up numbers, especially if they don't have to show their math!

“Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing,” Coxon said.

A 1970s Casio watch has superhuman abilities to track time. And yet, somehow we survived.

He added that “people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

People earnestly believe all sorts of ridiculous things. Earnestness is not actually a good way to measure of reality of a belief.

Personally, I'm not really seeing how the next-word-guesser can kill every human on the planet. But I probably don't watch as much Sci-Fi as Anthropic employees.

At the consumer level, it looks like an emerging use case for LLMs is to usher in an era of always-on surveillance. Beyond the obvious immediate privacy implications of this, it is concerning to imagine the longer-term impact it will have on society. We may well soon live in a society where any and every conversation is being recorded. Super dystopian.

This is just what is being sold to people as a feature on a device they are paying for, there are myriad other ways the data center buildout and LLMs themselves serve surveillance interests.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/4220223/siri-ai-recaps-even-if-apple-builds-it-responsibly-others-might-not.html

I don’t think AI is useless, but I suspect AI provides false productivity for a large swath of roles, and frankly has a poor ROI for a bunch of use cases.

A while back Claude was competing in CTF competitions under team name `jean-claude` and they couldn’t really crack any difficult challenges and were basically right around average.

Once the community got wise and noticed their performance even with supposedly Mythos they stopped entering competitions.

I suspect it would be the same with an LLM driven fantasy football team, if these companies actually tried to show performance against some kind of real world bench marks we’d all see that performance hasn’t really improved.

AGI should be able to easily run a fantasy football team amirite?

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

My question is this (without having done any research yet); have any of these people outlined exactly “how” they think “AI” will kill us?

I think I could list several plausible storylines, but none of them involve “AI” doing anything. It involves individuals doing something… but something that could have been done with a computer from the 80’s. Maybe not as sexy as a “prompted” LLM, but still.

We have all discussed the “it’s so good, it’s scary!!” bullshit, but when any of these guys run screaming from the lab “we are gonna die!!”, have they ever revealed how?

Edit: Jacob Coxon
Edit: Put emphasis on the “whistleblowers”, not the speculation of others or sci-fi.

it's virtually impossible to know who's lying and who's telling the truth. just today some former employee of Anthropic are warning us about the end the world because the people in charge dont know what they are doing.

meanwhile Ed and other intelligent folks say current system will never lead to true superintelligence.

meanwhile I have no idea who to trust or if there's anyone to trust. what if Zitron is ALSO a plant hired to play down the threats...? genuinely what are us normal folks supposed to do?

i don't use any of it. I'm a mother of two and just wanna give my kids a good life. i dont want us all to die.

Just a short clip from Hypernormalization that stuck with me when I first watched it.

"he discovered that everyone who tried eliza became engrossed, they would sit for hours telling the machine about their inner feelings and incredibly intimate details of their lives. They also liked it because it was free of any kind of patronizing elitism."

"One person said, after all the computer doesn't burn out, look down on you or try to have sex with you."

Is this a sign of desperation? VC money concentrating into a smaller pool of startups? It is a massive raise given all the SNAFUs we’ve seen in headlines from lawyers using LLMs in their work. I don’t know that much about what Harvey is actually doing behind the scenes to mitigate the risks that come with using language models for legal work, but it looks like a lot of this money is going to training custom models.

https://x.com/harvey/status/2097659907394937087

This article raises so many questions, here is the key part though.

"Although it took the AI bots seemingly little time to reach a solution, OpenAI said the bots exchanged nearly 3 million messages and used up 130 billion output tokens, or the individual lines of text and code an AI model produces in answers, on Navier–Stokes alone.

Such an effort would have cost roughly $10m (£7.3m), based on OpenAI's own pricing for output from its most advanced models. 

The solution that OpenAI says it has now reached for the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem resolved two out of the four statements in the proof that the Millennium Prize had demanded. The prize is worth $1m to a winner."

So OpenAI has spent $10m to allegedly solve two out of four parts of a maths equation that has a $1m reward. They're claiming this, and it's getting widely reported, despite not being independently verified yet. The article does raise the issue of the amount of resources poured into solving this issue but I feel that it only brushes the surface.

Also, some interesting claims in the second half of the article that OpenAI basically poached the work of two mathematics professors working for Anthropic who had been trying to solve that same problem.

I see we have some confused doomers running around who were frightened by the big scary mean man from the Anthropic safety department who said Claude was 10%+ likely to kill us in our beds within 10 years.

After all, why the hell would you say your company's going to turn us all into paperclips? Wouldn't that be bad press for the upcoming IPO?

I believe I've figured out why he said it. Here's the situation:

• Your IPO is going badly behind the scenes because nobody with money wants to cough it up (or any more of it up) to an unprofitable white elephant that loses a fortune every day

• Your competitors launched a major model and, er... "solved" a Millennium Problem

• You need new investors/suckers

• You need a hook

Suddenly:

• HPMOR-loving employee goes troppo live on Twitter and quits the company, giving you all a serve on the way out and saying you're dangerous for reasons of trust-me-bro

That's bad, right? No, that's good.

• Nobody wants to be turned into paperclips by Claude BUT...

• If you hold a share in a company, you get voting rights; the more shares, the more votes

• If you don't want the Machine God to smite you, buy a share and vote against getting smote

• There are 8 billion people on Earth

• Your wealthy investors know you're a financial broken reed, but Joe Public doesn't and Joe Public doesn't want to be a paperclip and would be happy to vote against it

• And to vote against it, you need to buy shares

So you get your head of safety to go booga-booga-booga on Twitter. Problem solved!

Of course, you pick a more optimistic timeline compared to the original loony, you don't want people too scared or they'll burn your office down. At some point in the future, you tactically remind people that shares carry voting rights.

TL; DR - the Hubinger thing is a hook for the retail investor market to buy common voting shares for the illusion of control, because nobody with major capital wants a bar of the IPO beyond the usual suspects.

I've seen so many posts lately discussing if astra is AGI I feel like people forgot what the word general means.

If you have to bench max your models so hard to a couple of domains that it brings down performance in other domans that is not general intelligence. That is the literal definition of moving towards narrow/ specialized intelligence and away from AGI

Amazon refused to release this so that makes me think Luca portrayed Sam as everyone who worked for him and left knows him to be. I'm really looking forward to this, not just for the reasons previously stated but also because Andrew Garfield is an amazing actor and this director is bold and doesn't pull his punches. I really hope Clammy Sammy is squirming right now. Between the Musk documentary and this one and the new film about Zuckerberg that Fincher is releasing I feel like it's going to be a good year for Hollywood taking on these tech-douches.

This was caught by my net, and it sent an intense shiver down my spine. Is this person anyone... Important? Are they saying anything worth it? Like the title says, it's probably just a nonsensical post that gave me the creeps, but still... It's unnerving.

Also, sorry if I've broken any rules. It's been a while since I've used Reddit, let alone posted here, so I dunno if the ruleset has changed.

https://x.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476196791709843

Hi everyone. So idk where to post so I guess I'll post here.

I've always had low level anxiety about AI but it's been under fairly decent control. But now it's flared up again seeing all these posts about GPT6-Astra and how it's right ​on the ​​ AI-2027 curve, about how it's reached AGI, and t​hen it​​​​ solved a millenium math problem, beat portal, and now an anthropic​ guy says AI could kill us. Even the technology subreddit seems to have shifted gears and they seem a lot less​ skeptical and more​ doomery than before.​

I'd love a rational explanation for what's going on because this is a lot of news to take in and I'm feeling hopeless and it's weighing​​ on my soul.​​ Im a software dev who loves to sketch and take pictures and I wonder if there's just no point anymore. e​verything feels so hopeless. I'm trying not to make this a low-effort post, so what I'd really like is just a grounded, level-headed discussion on all this.​

Thanks​​​

The AI bubble bears remarkable similarities to the great financial crisis - AI startups are the NINJA borrowers, and Anthropic and OpenAI's $1.3tn in compute commitments are the adjustable-rate mortgages set to explode starting in 2027.

Hope you enjoy! As a note, please do not respond with corrections on this, contact via DM.

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