(I get the feeling we’re close to this bubble’s end.)
Anyways, welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Cathartic venting, tangential to the ordure du jour: in high school everyone I had a crush on had a crush on Joseph Gordon Levitt. It brings me great joy to know that he is now alignment brainrotted, and I am not.
The AI 2027 authors are back: Q3.5 Timelines Update: Looks Like the Intelligence Explosion Will Happen in 2027 After All
It’s all about that new METR data. Took a quick scroll and the whole thing is about forecasting and modelling. Its pretty lengthy so if anyones willing to take the plunge and read it all youll have my thanks
METR recently estimated that Anthropic is now making AI progress about twice as fast as its historical rate (they would not be surprised by anything from 1.3x to 3x), and guessed that “perhaps ≈80%” of the current acceleration is due to AI. If they’re right, that implies an AI-driven acceleration that is 5 months ahead of the AI 2027 scenario.
Going down a little bit:
A 1.7x pace of progress is 5 months ahead of the AI 2027 scenario. AI 2027 predicted 2x AI R&D uplift in Dec 2026; as argued above, this would imply a substantially lower pace of progress than the 1.7x AI-attributable pace of progress that METR’s estimates imply for Nov. So when exactly did AI 2027 predict a 1.7x pace of progress over baseline? We created this trajectory by modifying a few key parameters until it roughly matched AI 2027. In that trajectory, 1.7x acceleration over the 2024.0–2025.5 rate of progress happens in roughly April 2027. So by this metric, we are ~5 months ahead of schedule.
And a chart of their predictions to end it all off:
(Only one person above 50%?)
Mark your calendars everybody!
It’s all about that new METR data.
Yeah, they seem to have moved on from multiplying sufficiently large matrixes is magic to thinking it’s actually the code writing that’ll get mystical any time now.
One more if statement bro
I have had to explain to my boss that METR are cultists
I vaguely remember it being mentioned that one of the METR staff was married to a rationalist (it was either an Anthropic employee or Paul Christiano, I forgot who)
TED-AI as in the meaninglessly distilled and contrived ted-talk idea of AI
Pretty sure its just a fancier term for AGI (Top Expert Dominating AI)
I intended it as a sneer lol. Aka I don’t see a difference in meanings here
ohhhh
So I went all the way down to the appendix, and found a gem:
Appendix: Ambiguity in “80% of current acceleration is due to AI”. Claude Opus 5.5 gives the following possible interpretations of METR’s claim that “we guess that a majority (perhaps ≈80%) of the current (October 2026) acceleration is due to AI.”
Claude Opus 5.5 gives the follow possible interpretations
Did…did they just say they used Claude for this?? (Ironic, because METR also used a bunch of Claude in the source article)
Also, this is the median value. No mean value and doesn’t seem much modal value. Only one paragraph where they mention that the acceleration was only on well-specified tasks (in the section titled “How large is the (AI-attributable) acceleration in the current pace of progress, really?”)
reposting this r/BetterOffline post for further context on the METR data
For years the LW types have just been saying ‘i asked claude’ about EVERYTHING
Wholesome indie Darling about human connection actually slopgobbled https://aftermath.site/big-walk-ai-igf-jurors-controversy/
discloses now rather than at launch because they’re just so wholesome and committed to ethics.
top quality sneer from “@1techuptopiapls” on X the fascism app:
”man proves AI improvements are not economically viable as new Anthropic model successfully cures cancer"
is the cure to cancer in the room with us right now
A number of responses (like, 2 out of the 3 that it shows) refer to ‘the scaling laws’ without elaboration. Is this some jargon special to AI bros?
yeah essentially
the scaling laws are basically that AGI/ASI can be created by just scaling up the current LLMs
But they really aren’t! The actually interesting scaling laws from about 5-7 years ago that opened up machine learning to more applications all show that everything about machine learning is power-law diminishing returns with linear improvements in any metric requiring exponential increases in numbers of parameters / amounts of data / number of backprop cycles applied.
The scaling laws maxed out around mid 2023 with the release of GPT-4 - that was around the time that everyone got excited about “test time inference” which is where LLMs spit out reasoning streams to convince you they are “thinking”. If you look at where LLMs have improved since then it’s mainly in tasks where they can be strapped into a harness and given concrete feedback like “your program didn’t compile” which are also coincidentally use cases where data from gpt and Claude users can easily be harvested and new training data can be squeezed out of underpaid third world mturkers.
In other words they’ve improved their training data in the specific domains they are operating in like we’ve been doing in machine learning since the mid 90s…
The big labs have just been doing an incredible job of marketing (and particularly in Anthropic’s case, brain damaging themselves into believing their own marketing)
This guy probably thinks that outputting sloppily written proofs to math problems is the same thing as curing cancer because both of them are done by super smart scientific brain geniuses and the AI is an even bigger brain genius.
most of the other replies are all ‘well yeah we knew sustaining AI progress would need exponentially more resources but its like definitely worth it’
When children go to sleep, the Sandman shows them dreams. When AI boosters go to sleep, the Smiling Man shows them nightmares.
And that gets us back to istewart and Dave Karpf’s point that these companies sell a narrative about what the future will be and who controls it, because they can not build that future.
It’s just ‘well the financials don’t make any sense and these companies are not looking profitable anytime soon but like AI models are super duper good and AGI is right around the corner so you need to invest’
new odium symposium episode. we talk about Lawrence Mead, the NYU professor who advanced much of the theory behind the US welfare reform of the 90s, and his more recent project of inventing a newer, better racism. https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/28-racism-2-174814488 or any podcast app
Total System Failure: U.S. Government Networks Will Need To Be Torched And Rebuilt
Interesting if you want a rundown of US gov IT security fuckups, so far, in light of nvidia’s Jansen being recently revealed to have been compromised by Chinese intelligence.
I’ve noted repeatedly in my writing that the Trump administration’s cybersecurity policy has been indistinguishable from a foreign attack.
I have wondered for a long time what sorts of clandestine messages are going over the newly installed Starlink terminals, bypassing the normal firewalls and logs between sensitive systems and the terrestrial internet backbone…
very gendered and heteronormative (and it admits it), but might be interesting?
A Scandal at the Center of the Economy
This scandal holds an irony that’s especially befitting of the AI moment. Huang seemingly has cozied up to his industry’s No. 1 foe, China, the boogeyman that, by the professed logic of Silicon Valley’s AI executives, is forcing many of his peers to build a product that they fear. Instead of denouncing him, Washington and Silicon Valley are motivated to circle the wagons around Huang, in part because doing so keeps the system moving and the money flowing. The build at all costs rationale that dictates treating China’s AI prowess as an existential threat is also driving the same people to brush past an egregious dalliance with that enemy.
This is the type of warped incentives that the AI race produces. Playing the game necessitates embracing preposterous risk to justify an idealized future outcome. To run this race requires its participants to withstand intense cognitive dissonance and behave in ways that make them appear ever more inscrutable and reckless to those who are not involved. If nothing else, Huang is a useful example to understand what happens when the fortunes of countries and many of its most powerful citizens are all tied up in one progressively intricate technological and financial bet. In this way, Huang is the AI boom personified, a hyperobject of a man who has wound his way into the center of the economy and whose influence, depending on how you look at it, may usher in either prosperity or untold doom.
Any other no slop instances? especially that don’t federate with the proslop ones?
From Vulncheck’s blog:
AI is a valuable tool for finding vulnerabilities, and I’m not discounting that. But seven months in, the evidence still doesn’t match the launch narrative. The CVEs are a sliver of this year’s total, almost none are being exploited, fixes have stalled while duplicates and withdrawals pile up, and the triage burden is shifting onto the open source maintainers Glasswing promised to help. The receipts keep coming in. They still don’t reconcile.
55% false-positive rate. The only useful tool there is the one writing that blog post.
The only useful tool there is the one writing that blog post.
Did your fingers start smoking while writing that?
That’s it, I’m trying a 9front this weekend
Post screenshot of forum from within new OS, as is traditional
I’m actually enjoying how relevant AI 2027 is staying, it’ll make it harder for the boosters to downplay it and easier for us to sneer at it over the next few years as it becomes increasingly blatant how wrong it was.
Isn’t it pretty bad for the scenario that the China nationalising stuff didn’t happen, since a race with China is the main fuel for the scenario’s fire? Most of the stuff they got correct this time around were no-brainers (business gurus talking about AI and the market for junior engineers being in turmoil) plus, they didn’t get the ‘people who know how to use AI are making a killing’ mostly right either
Anyways still extremely doubtful of superhuman coders in March 2027
(edit: it would actually be superhuman coders in Jan 2027 according to the tracker due to the chart saying some of Anthropic’s models are 11 weeks ahead)
There is loads of stuff they didn’t get right. The benefit of the narrative format is that any specific details they get blatantly wrong they can spin as just being part of the fictional narrative and not a deliberate prediction. They can also shrug off discredit by claiming that only their technical predictions were accurate, not their political predictions. In fact, as we’ve speculated recently on sneerclub, one move the boosters may make is blaming the bubble pop (and subsequent failure to produce AGI) on the Democrats winning, because obviously if the LLM companies had kept up their momentum just a few months longer surely they would have achieved recursive self improvement (and all the wondrous things they’ve promised that would follow).
The coding stuff is going to be fun, if what I heard about the coding bots having reached their maximum (and ai companies now moving to other fields to build specialized models for (which fits my prediction that they wouldn’t build AGI and all the ‘gains’ would be more and more unwieldy specializes modules/models. Like the ‘correctly count the r’s in strawberry’ one)).
oh, so right wing Christian eschatology, but without any of the Jesus.
Like how they drifted into a discussion of free will instantly.
we got Robo-Jesus instead
We thought we were making Robojesus but instead wound up with ED-209 Lazarus
El-Sayed supports Bernie’s call to pause AI
so needless to say, dark times ahead for the AI industry
It will be very interesting to see who/which firms among the VC class attempt to buy off the new Democrats, and who sticks to A16Z’s “build! techno-optimism!” bit.
I feel like Anthropic will try to bend to the dems
Authors, maintainers, editors and distributors of “this software” would pledge to ensure the software remained free and publicly accessible, and would also vow to “take his or her own life with a sword upon failure to uphold any of the pledges in this license,” the illustration read. It was labeled “Source Seppuku License,” an apparent reference to a traditional Japanese ritual suicide.
got its own post
