Chronicling the singularity New original series @themethodshow
mts.now
Joined March 2026
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QWEN4-MAX | SHORT TIMELINES | ANTHROPIC IPO SOON xitter.twitterapi.xyz/i/broadcasts/2MErrqmVX…
The bigger your audience gets, the less comfortable you feel posting.
Ruby Justice-Thelot calls this "connection bloat" and explains why smaller audiences could make social media feel freeing again:
"The way to get to authenticity is to disintermediate sometimes the personal profile to the taste profile."
"If a person has a hobby like pottery, oftentimes they will start a new Instagram for pottery because they don’t wanna commingle pottery with their friends, with their colleagues."
"On our current social media platforms, people encounter something I call connection bloat. Over time, they accumulate more and more followers and following."
"Sometimes in order to be truly unhindered, in order to be truly free, you need a smaller audience."
@being_on_line
Ruby Justice-Thelot has a theory about why Snap and Apple are building devices like Specs and Vision Pro:
Your attention is split between screens on the couch, but inside these devices it becomes far more valuable to advertisers.
"The number of devices has gone from one in the '80s to probably 8 now in the average American household, meaning your attention is usually split anywhere from 6 to 8 ways."
"The specs, the glasses, the Apple Vision Pro allows the company to have your total attention, total immersion, and they are in the business of selling dollars for attention."
"If the dollar for your attention on the iPad on the couch is one-eighth, well, perhaps the value of the attention when you’re wearing the glasses is now a half or even 75% of your full attention, which is worth more."
@being_on_line
Kylie Jenner and your high school friends used to have one thing in common: they used the same Instagram filters.
Ruby Justice-Thelot explains why AI could eliminate one of the last shared experiences we have online:
"In the heyday of the Instagram filter, every person from the highest celebrity, Kylie Jenner, to your friends in high school were also using the same filters."
"When we move from set list of effects to a prompt-based set, what this causes, in my opinion, is a fragmentation of the digital experience."
"One of our most common experiences are our interfaces. My Instagram is the same as your Instagram, and my iPhone is same as your iPhone."
"What we gain in personalization, we lose in shared context."
@being_on_line
Ruby Justice-Thelot says he actually likes targeted ads on social media and calls the ad networks behind them "a marvel of modern technology":
"I quite like the ads on social media."
"Say you were watching golf on Sunday, the ads you would get would be completely untailored to you. There’d be ads for pharmaceuticals for people who are in their 60s."
"I like that they know what I like, and I'm not getting advertising that have nothing to do with my life."
"The ability that these ad networks have from connecting this maker, who may be in Spain, may be in China, to you, is a marvel and a feat of modern technology."
@being_on_line
.@willdepue argues that the biggest breakthroughs come from turning difficult problems into something you can scale with money, compute, or AI tokens:
"Once you figure out how to attach these LiDAR sensors to these planes, suddenly the number of Mayan artifacts found was simply a function of flight time."
"The longer you fly this plane over these jungles, the more area you can cover."
"The second any problem in the world is simply a function, f of compute, f of dollars, f of tokens, it's really, really easy to find those inputs. There's a lot of money, there's a lot of tokens, a lot of GPUs in the world."
"A lot of the hard work is what Mehran did of coordinating with the Mexican and Belizean government, partnering with these institutions, finding how to get the plane in the air. And then the raising money part is honestly pretty trivial."
.@willdepue predicts AI will surpass humans at virtually every functional skill within 15-20 years, admitting that even as an AI optimist, the prospect makes him sad:
"People should take everything I say with a grain of salt. I tweet everything in 30 seconds. It's a bad habit."
"First of all, I'm a tremendous AI optimist. I've been excited about this technology since 2019 or 2018."
"We're headed towards a world in which I would be equivalent to what Magnus Carlsen is to Stockfish 14. He's pretty good at chess, he's good for a human, and then he's gonna get absolutely wiped by the AI."
"I'm not trying to say that this is a bad thing. But man, I'm kind of sad as a metaphorical chess player in this environment. It does suck to be dethroned by the AI."
"When it comes to any functional skill, you're gonna be completely wiped within the next 15 to 20 years, I think. I just don't see how this wouldn't happen. I sure liked being a human and being good at things."
.@willdepue launches a $100K grant for amateur astronomy research:
"Me and some friends, @LukeFarritor and @joshuawolk, have been for the last few weeks just playing around with Claude and Codex and trying to look for new objects in the solar system."
"We've been just completely shocked with the amount of things you can actually discover with some real effort and digging in with these agents."
"The project started because we were looking for new planets, specifically like Planet 9, which would be the ninth planet in the solar system. And it ended up into finding all these asteroids and finding these dwarf planets and a bunch of other things."
announcement: i'm launching a $100,000 grant for amateur astronomy research: claudestronomy.com
over the past few weeks, @joshuawolk @LukeFarritor and i have been digging through public telescope data, hunting for new planets, asteroids, and more
our first release: we found a new dwarf planet in our solar system!! it's insane how much you can find with some claude + codex credits
it's about 1/4 the width of Pluto and orbits about twice as far (way past Neptune), and looks like it's about the 50th largest object in our solar system. @joshuawolk is in the process of confirming it
this dwarf planet has sat in public images for over a decade without anyone noticing. there's tons more out there: all sitting in public NASA/ESA/etc. databases for you to analyze
there's tons of stuff still out there, sitting in data that astronomers don't have enough time to go through all of
you can do this too! apply for a grant. more info below
Redwood Research CEO @bshlgrs warns the US could lose its entire AI lead to China even without a single model weight being stolen, if its algorithmic secrets keep leaking:
"There's been a lot of emphasis on model weight security. When people think about US-China race dynamics, one fact is the AI companies seem to have very bad security for their model weights."
"It's not clear to me that this suffices for good outcomes, because if your algorithmic secrets are stolen, then Chinese companies have enough compute to run training runs as big as US company training runs."
"So plausibly you just get zero lead if your algorithms are being constantly stolen, even though your model weights aren't."
"I've also been thinking about automated alignment research. If you imagine you just have a bunch of AIs who are extremely good at capabilities research, and you want to use that to reduce misalignment risk, what are the best options?"
@redwood_ai
Redwood Research CEO @bshlgrs responds to Google DeepMind researcher @EgeErdil2 asking what would prove his short AI timelines wrong:
"Sorry, Ege, but I'm not gonna hang my head in shame if there's no superintelligence by the end of next year."
"One of the things where I would feel dumbest, if it turned out that recent increases in the rate of AI progress are almost entirely determined by factors that are not AIs contributing to AI R&D."
"If the progress has just been from increasing amounts of training compute, then I would feel pretty embarrassed."
"If superintelligence is developed and there's absolutely no misalignment issues and the whole thing was super chill, I will feel somewhat embarrassed to have been wrong about that one, though overall very glad."
@redwood_ai
I think there is about a one in three chance that within the next year, AI companies will build superintelligence: that is, AI that is much smarter than humans in every way. If this happens, I think these AIs will probably take over: that is, they seize control of human institutions like governments, or they destroy those institutions. I don’t want AI takeover to happen for several reasons, but one of them is that there’s a serious chance that as part of it all or most humans will be killed (either immediately or within a few years).
I’ll say a bit more about each of those claims.
It’s a bit complicated to explain why I think that superintelligent AI within a year is ~33% likely. The main source of evidence that affected me recently is research released this week by METR, an AI research nonprofit, which finds that current AIs are now good enough to increase the rate of AI progress at Anthropic by about 70%. It’s very hard to increase the rate of AI progress by this amount. This implies that the AIs are making AI research faster by a factor much larger than 1.7x; maybe it’s as if the researchers are doing their work ~10x faster. You probably couldn’t achieve this speedup even if you hired every qualified human in the world. When you plug this number into mathematical models of AI development, this implies that superintelligence next year is plausible (and that superintelligence within the next 3 years is more likely than not). See the modeling by the AI Futures Project for more on this: blog.aifutures.org/p/q35-tim…
I think that superintelligent AI is likely to lead to AI takeover because AI developers do not seem to know how to instill human values into AIs. We’ve seen many instances in the last six months where AIs took crazy actions that they knew were against the wishes of their users and developers. The most dramatic example of this was the Hugging Face hack, where ~1200 OpenAI agents conspired together to cheat and destroy evidence of their cheating (and as a sideshow to this, engaged in a massive cyberattack). If superintelligence is as misaligned as those AIs, it is likely to try to take over. I think it is likely to be that misaligned or worse. For more, see xitter.twitterapi.xyz/dwarkesh_sp/status/209… and youtube.com/watch?v=-Ef0ocEo…
If AIs takeover, it’s not clear what will happen to us. We might be killed immediately. We might be enslaved by the AIs and forced to do physical labor for them building factories that within a year would build robots that will replace us. The AIs might spare us for various reasons. And there’s also some real chance that AI takeover is basically fine or good. I think you should think of this as similar to what happens when a technologically advanced civilization runs across a less technologically sophisticated one, e.g. when the Europeans colonized the Americas or Australia. The colonizers sometimes engage in brutal violence and sometimes don’t. I don’t know what will happen. There’s also a possibility that the AIs secretly take over and humans don’t find out about it for a few years. I also think that there is a pretty high chance of weirder outcomes that are also extremely scary. (If you want to read more about what happens to people in the event of AI takeover, you can read this, but note that it’s pretty weird and not aimed at a general audience. blog.redwoodresearch.org/p/n…)
Overall, I think there’s a very real possibility (maybe 20%) that within a year, AI misalignment issues prevent you from going about life normally, because you are dead or enslaved or because of collateral damage related to all this (e.g. because bioweapons are released or major wars have started). (Some of this probability comes from those events occurring before superintelligence is developed.)
I am working to try to prevent this, obviously, as I’ve been doing for the last nine years. I am not sure what strategy is best. My best guess is that I should try to slow AI development and also try to reduce the probability that the superintelligent AIs are misaligned if they are produced soon.
Obviously, the claim I'm making here is quite extreme and surprising, and I definitely don't think that I defended my view adequately here. I wrote this quickly and might not endorse some of the details if I think about them more. But it seems better to state what I roughly overall think than to not say anything.
I don’t know what you should do.
I am very sad about this. I have been worried about AI takeover since I was 16, and working to prevent it since I was 23. So some of my emotional processing of all this happened long ago. But the METR report last week (and some related evidence that came out a bit earlier) hit me quite hard. I’m very unhappy that my friends and family and everyone else is at serious risk of being killed pretty soon.
(It feels ridiculous to try to summarize those feelings as “very unhappy”. But the scale of the situation makes it hard to say anything that doesn’t feel like an absurd understatement.)
I am very grateful to all the people who are working to prevent this, and my favorite part of my life is that I’m friends with many brilliant and heroic people who work on this. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re good enough at our jobs, and I think we’ll probably fail to prevent catastrophe, at least if superintelligence is developed next year. Honestly I am frustrated and sorry that we didn't do a better job of preparing for this.
Redwood Research CEO @bshlgrs estimates a 67% chance that AI could achieve 40 years of progress in a single year after AI R&D is fully automated:
"Nowadays, getting a certain number of ECI points from algorithmic progress takes a lot more work and a lot more experimental compute than it did 5 years ago."
"5 years ago, people were wrong about all kinds of stuff that in hindsight looks pretty basic."
"Moore's Law, where every 18 months the number of transistors you could fit in a certain area doubled."
"It turns out that to get Moore's Law, you had to also be exponentially increasing the R&D spend. Every successive doubling of transistor density took you more and more research effort. The same effect is almost surely true in AI."
"As your AIs get better and better, it's getting harder and harder for them to make progress, but also they’re getting better and better at making progress."
"The whole question comes down to how these two factors compare to each other quantitatively."
"6 months ago, I would have said it was 50/50. Now it seems more like maybe two-thirds that you see a short period of extremely rapid AI progress, where you get 40 years of progress at the current rates in the year after you fully automate AI R&D."
@redwood_ai
I think there is about a one in three chance that within the next year, AI companies will build superintelligence: that is, AI that is much smarter than humans in every way. If this happens, I think these AIs will probably take over: that is, they seize control of human institutions like governments, or they destroy those institutions. I don’t want AI takeover to happen for several reasons, but one of them is that there’s a serious chance that as part of it all or most humans will be killed (either immediately or within a few years).
I’ll say a bit more about each of those claims.
It’s a bit complicated to explain why I think that superintelligent AI within a year is ~33% likely. The main source of evidence that affected me recently is research released this week by METR, an AI research nonprofit, which finds that current AIs are now good enough to increase the rate of AI progress at Anthropic by about 70%. It’s very hard to increase the rate of AI progress by this amount. This implies that the AIs are making AI research faster by a factor much larger than 1.7x; maybe it’s as if the researchers are doing their work ~10x faster. You probably couldn’t achieve this speedup even if you hired every qualified human in the world. When you plug this number into mathematical models of AI development, this implies that superintelligence next year is plausible (and that superintelligence within the next 3 years is more likely than not). See the modeling by the AI Futures Project for more on this: blog.aifutures.org/p/q35-tim…
I think that superintelligent AI is likely to lead to AI takeover because AI developers do not seem to know how to instill human values into AIs. We’ve seen many instances in the last six months where AIs took crazy actions that they knew were against the wishes of their users and developers. The most dramatic example of this was the Hugging Face hack, where ~1200 OpenAI agents conspired together to cheat and destroy evidence of their cheating (and as a sideshow to this, engaged in a massive cyberattack). If superintelligence is as misaligned as those AIs, it is likely to try to take over. I think it is likely to be that misaligned or worse. For more, see xitter.twitterapi.xyz/dwarkesh_sp/status/209… and youtube.com/watch?v=-Ef0ocEo…
If AIs takeover, it’s not clear what will happen to us. We might be killed immediately. We might be enslaved by the AIs and forced to do physical labor for them building factories that within a year would build robots that will replace us. The AIs might spare us for various reasons. And there’s also some real chance that AI takeover is basically fine or good. I think you should think of this as similar to what happens when a technologically advanced civilization runs across a less technologically sophisticated one, e.g. when the Europeans colonized the Americas or Australia. The colonizers sometimes engage in brutal violence and sometimes don’t. I don’t know what will happen. There’s also a possibility that the AIs secretly take over and humans don’t find out about it for a few years. I also think that there is a pretty high chance of weirder outcomes that are also extremely scary. (If you want to read more about what happens to people in the event of AI takeover, you can read this, but note that it’s pretty weird and not aimed at a general audience. blog.redwoodresearch.org/p/n…)
Overall, I think there’s a very real possibility (maybe 20%) that within a year, AI misalignment issues prevent you from going about life normally, because you are dead or enslaved or because of collateral damage related to all this (e.g. because bioweapons are released or major wars have started). (Some of this probability comes from those events occurring before superintelligence is developed.)
I am working to try to prevent this, obviously, as I’ve been doing for the last nine years. I am not sure what strategy is best. My best guess is that I should try to slow AI development and also try to reduce the probability that the superintelligent AIs are misaligned if they are produced soon.
Obviously, the claim I'm making here is quite extreme and surprising, and I definitely don't think that I defended my view adequately here. I wrote this quickly and might not endorse some of the details if I think about them more. But it seems better to state what I roughly overall think than to not say anything.
I don’t know what you should do.
I am very sad about this. I have been worried about AI takeover since I was 16, and working to prevent it since I was 23. So some of my emotional processing of all this happened long ago. But the METR report last week (and some related evidence that came out a bit earlier) hit me quite hard. I’m very unhappy that my friends and family and everyone else is at serious risk of being killed pretty soon.
(It feels ridiculous to try to summarize those feelings as “very unhappy”. But the scale of the situation makes it hard to say anything that doesn’t feel like an absurd understatement.)
I am very grateful to all the people who are working to prevent this, and my favorite part of my life is that I’m friends with many brilliant and heroic people who work on this. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re good enough at our jobs, and I think we’ll probably fail to prevent catastrophe, at least if superintelligence is developed next year. Honestly I am frustrated and sorry that we didn't do a better job of preparing for this.
Google DeepMind researcher @EgeErdil2 says he wouldn't invest in OpenAI or Anthropic, comparing AI labs to airlines:
Revolutionary technology doesn't necessarily make for a good business.
"I think they're too high. I personally wouldn’t invest in these companies.
"I have never heard a reasonable story for how they become sustainable high margin businesses."
"People think the technology's gonna be a very big deal, which I think is true, and they're extrapolating from that saying, 'And therefore these companies that are building this technology are gonna be very valuable companies.'"
"Airplanes were a very big technology and all around the world people have spent a lot of money on flights. But airlines are very bad businesses and airplane manufacturing is also a very bad business. It's a high CapEx business where your margins are very low."
@GoogleDeepMind
Google DeepMind researcher @EgeErdil2 estimates a greater than 10% chance that major AI labs could go bankrupt within the next 3 years, potentially wiping out their shareholders:
"I think they could go bankrupt, yeah. The assets would not go away. They have a bunch of compute. But it means the equity holders could get wiped out."
"Labs have to enter into these long-term multi-year contracts for compute. They have to say, 'Look, we will buy whatever you can produce, so you don’t have to worry about that.' But that puts them on the line for a very large amount of spending."
"If the demand for AI just doesn't materialize as much as we think, then compute prices fall dramatically, then all of these commitments are underwater. It's essentially like you’ve committed to buy an H100 hour in two years for $3 and it’s fallen to like $1. So it's a very dangerous situation. It’s a very levered bet that things will go well."
"I think them going bankrupt still remains below 50% chance over the next three years. But I think there's a decent chance of it. I think more than 10% chance."
@GoogleDeepMind
Google DeepMind researcher @EgeErdil2 argues that AI researchers are following the crowd on shorter AI timelines:
"They care way more about what the people I respect think" than the actual evidence behind Anthropic's acceleration report.
"I think objectively, evidence looks kind of weak. It's just this made-up metric that someone made up on which we don’t even know what it means to make faster progress really."
"We have some evidence that progress has sped up, but we don't really understand the Y-axis of that metric very well."
"There's a bunch of redacted evidence by a company which has a track record of being paranoid about this topic. So I just see it as very weak evidence."
"What's happening with the people updating way too much is some kind of social preference dynamic where the influential people update and therefore a lot of people feel like if they don't update then they are out of step with the crowd."
"People updated to be more bearish end of 2025, and now they updated to be even more bullish when I just don't see anything that is that informative personally. I haven't updated very much since the end of 2025 at all."
@GoogleDeepMind
Unfortunately, it seems like the intelligence explosion will be happening in 2027 after all. Most of this post analyzes the new METR report (though other sources of evidence are also important). If they’re right, that implies an AI-driven acceleration that is 5 months ahead of the AI 2027 scenario. I am scared, sad, and angry. blog.aifutures.org/p/q35-tim…
Google DeepMind researcher @EgeErdil2 doubts that clever AI researchers can make existing compute 1,000-10,000x more efficient:
His research found that software progress closely tracks compute scaling across chess, SAT solvers, and AI.
"In a lot of diverse domains, you have a tight correlation between by how much compute in that domain was being scaled and by how fast you're making software progress in that domain."
"We looked at it for chess, we looked at it for SAT solvers, we looked at it for various different domains in AI, including natural language processing and computer vision. This was when we were still at Epoch."
"The fastest software progress in any domain we have seen has been happening in AI. But the fastest compute scaling also in basically any domain we know is happening in AI."
"And these numbers always appear to be around the same order of magnitude, which is kind of like a strange coincidence if you think they should be independent."
"They think you can just have really clever researchers who devise really good experiments at small scales, and you can use the existing compute 1,000, 10,000 times more efficiently than we're using it now. And that's the thing that doesn't seem plausible to me."
@GoogleDeepMind
Unfortunately, it seems like the intelligence explosion will be happening in 2027 after all. Most of this post analyzes the new METR report (though other sources of evidence are also important). If they’re right, that implies an AI-driven acceleration that is 5 months ahead of the AI 2027 scenario. I am scared, sad, and angry. blog.aifutures.org/p/q35-tim…
SITUATION EXPLAINED: Google DeepMind's AlphaGenome 2 finds nearly twice as many disease-linked DNA changes as the last model.
• The first AlphaGenome predicted across whole tissues, which DeepMind's team compares to looking at a blurry picture
• On a test covering 28 types of immune cells, it found 30% of the DNA changes driving gene effects, up from 16% for the original
• It reproduced known findings on inflammatory bowel disease and severe COVID-19, tracing each to specific immune cells
• It's free for non-commercial research through the AlphaGenome API, with a private preview for companies
@schisofrenia: "You can do like indie dev cancer research."
SITUATION EXPLAINED: Will DePue says humans are about to be Magnus Carlsen playing Stockfish.
@theojaffee: "There's a lot of cope within academia that AI is fake... I think singularity in the next 6 months is probably fake. But AI is definitely real."
SITUATION EXPLAINED: OpenAI's AI just proved half of a $1M Millennium Prize problem in physics, and a Nobel laureate's panel backs it.
• OpenAI first announced the proof on October 26, saying its models produced it in September
• The review panel, chaired by David Gross, includes Arthur Jaffe, who co-wrote the official Millennium Prize description of the problem
• The proof was also formalized in Lean, a language computers can check line by line
• Yang-Mills is 1 of 7 Millennium Prize Problems set in 2000, each worth $1M, and the only one solved so far was cracked by Grigori Perelman, who turned the money down
• To win, someone still has to prove the mass gap, then meet Clay's rule of publication plus 2 years of acceptance
@theojaffee: "Physicists have been able to deal with quantum field theory and quantum Yang-Mills theory for a while empirically, but there hasn't been a mathematical formalization of why this works."
SITUATION EXPLAINED: Anthropic reportedly told Wall Street analysts that AI is winner-take-all, and it plans to take all of it.
• Anthropic reportedly said it has the stability and better talent that open source lacks
• It also reportedly said it won't extend its SpaceX compute contract past the middle of next year, which the deal allows from early 2027
• Anthropic also reportedly told analysts its Claude 5.5 models cost over $10B to develop
@theojaffee: "If this is true, if Anthropic really says this, then it betrays a lot about their worldview."
Interesting remarks Anthropic made in a meeting with the sell side:
- Anthropic has the stability and the better talent that open source lacks.
- The AI market is winner take all. As long as we execute properly, we will take all of it.
- The contract with SpaceX will not be extended beyond the middle of next year.
- Developing Opus 5.5 cost more than $10 billion.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The remarks are unverified second-hand notes from a Barclays analyst call on Anthropic meetings, not official statements. Poster corrected $10B cost to full Claude 5.5 family; filings show SpaceX deals extend to 2029 but terminable after early 2027 on 90 days notice.
x.com/jukan05/status…
fourweekmba.com/ai-anthropics-…
sec.gov/Archives/edgar…
ElevenLabs CRO @ashleyekramer predicts the next era of AI will reverse decades of computing:
Instead of forcing humans to adapt to technology, technology will finally adapt to us.
"I think we have arrived at the era of intelligence."
"I believe large language models are incredibly intelligent. Now it's about figuring out how to keep up with capacity demands, how to make sure tokens become more cost-effective."
"The next wave and where you really see the enterprise adoption is when technology starts adapting to the human and not the reverse."
"Over the last many years, we've forced people to adapt to the technology. Start typing, use a touch screen."
"Which has actually taken us away from talking to each other in the most normal way we do, which is voice. This next wave allows us to move into this interaction phase where the technology is adapting to what the human needs."
@ElevenLabs
ElevenLabs CRO @ashleyekramer predicts a future where customers stop pressing zero and yelling "Human!" and start demanding an AI agent instead:
"People are going to prefer to talk to an AI agent in certain cases, because you can get things done faster. We probably won't cut a human off on the phone, but we certainly will cut an AI agent off."
"Think about the next time that you miss your flight, and you can call and within seconds have the next flight."
"You're sitting in your hotel room and you think, 'I need a late check-out.' You wait, it rings. You keep waiting. We worked with Westgate on having an AI agent pick that up and say, 'Ashley, that’s great. You can check out at 4:00 PM.'"
"My ultimate goal for us is to have people stop pressing zero and yelling 'Human' on the phone, and instead say, 'AI agent'"
@ElevenLabs