It’s not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.
Maybe it’s just me but even the enhanced lighting aspect doesn’t look especially good, at least where faces are concerned; shining a hard light sideways so every facial nook and cranny gets highlighted in excruciating detail looks less natural and more like the old android HDR photo filter, even before you realize it’s giving some characters instagram make-overs.
Probably should’ve written ‘not a deal breaker’ instead of not a big deal.
It’s possible the attempt to shove AI in every nook and cranny in the pentagon didn’t especially pan out and since his face was all over that project, he’s desperate for a scapegoat.
Like for sure he’d have had the logistics of the entire US army running smoothly despite layoffs by now, if it weren’t for the wokies in anthropic acting up.
It is nuts to deny the experiences these people are having. They’re not vibe-coding mission-critical AWS modules. They’re not generating tech debt at scale:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful-failure-modes
They’re just adding another automation tool to a highly automated practice, and using it when it makes sense. Perhaps they won’t always choose wisely, but that’s normal too. There’s plenty of ways that pre-AI automation tools for software development led programmers astray. A skilled, centaur-configured programmer learns from experience which automation tools they should trust, and under which circumstances, and guides themselves accordingly.
Wow, the whole thing is indefensibly capital-W wrong, just an utterly weird rose-tinted view of the current corporate experience.
The one-shotting phenomenon (or how a positive initial experience with the technology seems to lead to a heavily biased view of its merits) should probably be considered a distinct cognitive bias at this point.
Turns out a lot of bright people can’t deal with a technology being utterly subjective in its efficiency, and also how that’s specifically the part that reduces it to being so narrowly useful as to force the existential question, given the insane resource burn and the socioeconomic disruption that’s part and parcel, even if like Doctorow you think that their rape and pillage of artist’s rights and intellectual property in general isn’t an especially big deal.
Also, local LLMs are hardly extricable from the whole mess, they are basically a byproduct, and updated versions only will keep coming as long as their imperial size online counterparts remain a viable concern.
In the original post he kept referring to Ollama like it was an LLM instead of a server app that hosts LLMs so I’d say the jury’s out on that.
edit: Also, throughout this piece he keeps equivocating between local LLMs and their behemoth online counterparts with their heavily proprietary tooling that occasionally wraps them into a somewhat useful product.
I think he assumes that because he can load up a modest speech-to-text model locally and casually transcribe several hours of video resources in somewhat short order (this was apparently his major formative experience with modern AI) it works the same with e.g. coding.
Like, hey gpt-oss please make sense of these ten thousand lines of context without access to a hundred bespoke MCP intermediaries and one or three functioning RAG systems as I watch the token generation rate slow to a trickle while the context window gradually fills up.
Usually, you wake up on a lifeless beach that’s adorned with some sort of abandoned marble temple. It’s supposed to be beautiful, but instead it’s really sad. Almost unbearably sad. So much so that you want to get away from it. So you crawl downward into these vents going below the horrible temple, and suddenly it’s like you’re moving through the innards of an incomprehensible machine that’s thudding away, thud, thud, thud. And as you get deeper, the metal sidings are carved with scrawled ominous curses and slurs directed toward you, and you hear the voices, louder than before, and you somehow know these people are in pain because of you. It keeps getting colder. Color drains from the world. And you see the crowd through the slats of the vents: pale and emaciated men, women, and children from centuries to come, all of them pressed together for warmth in some sort of unending cavern. What clothes they have are torn and ragged. Before you know it, their dirty hands and dirty fingernails lurch through the grates, and they’re reaching for you, tearing at your shirt, moaning terrible things about their suffering and how you made it happen, you made it, and you need to stop this now, now, now. And next they’re ripping you apart, limb from limb, and you are joining them in the gray dimness forever.
A potential massive uptick of consumer tier subscribers that they don’t break even on at the same time the DoD fallout drives more lucrative prospects away could be fun to watch at least, a considerable chunk of the llm code helper ecosystem appears to hinge on anthropic not doing anything crazy like suddenly hiking prices.
edit: Aaaand they had a worldwide outage
It unthickened, it was just Altman grandstanding while at the same time taking over Antrhopic’s DoD DoW: The Everything App contracts.
Pentagon labels Anthropic a supply-chain risk, strikes deal with OpenAI whose president Greg Brockman is a Trump mega-donor.
🍌🍌🍌
Trump added there would be a six-month phase-out for the Defense Department and other agencies that use the company’s products. If Anthropic does not help with the transition, Trump said, he would use “the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow.”
The designation could bar tens of thousands of contractors from using Anthropic’s AI when working for the Pentagon. That represents an existential threat to its business with the government and could harm its private-sector relationships, said Franklin Turner, an attorney who specializes in government contracts.
“Blacklisting Anthropic is the contractual equivalent of nuclear war,” he said.
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As far as I can tell it’s only on anthropic’s word that that’s the main issue, DoD just talks about unfettered access for all lawful purposes, which is basically a bend-the-knee-or-else framing, and pivoting away from that to bargaining on particulars will make them look weak, so I guess that’s that for now.
Αnthropic being against mass surveillance and autonomous weaponry while in bed with Palantir is kind of if IBM took a stand against antisemitism while spearheading the computerization of the third reich prison system.
Kudos to Dario for stepping off the hype train for one millisecond to admit that using an LLM to control an automated weapons platform is currently kind of out of scope for this technology, I bet that took a toll on his psyche.
And also for pointing out that something can be legal only because the law hasn’t yet caught up with the technology.
It’s entirely possible he does get that it’s a nothing burger but is just being his usual disingenuous self to pull people in.
I mean the whole entire premise (not unique to this post, scoot’s gotten a lot of mileage out of this) is shoehorning LLMs into the predictive coding framework mostly on the grounds that they both use prediction terminology and deal with work units that they call neurons, with the added bonus that PC posits Bayesian inference is involved so it’s obviously extra valid.
Queue a few thousand words of scoot wearing his science popularizer hat and just declaring the most vacuous shit imaginable with a straight face and a friendly teacher’s casual authority.
He isn’t even trying with the yellow and orange boxes. What the fuck do “high-D toroidal attractor manifolds” and “6D helical manifolds” have to do with anything? Why are they there? And he really thinks he can get away with nobody closely reading his charts, with the “(???, nothing)” business. Maybe I should throw in that box in my publications and see how that goes.
It’s from another horseshit analogy that roughly boils down to both neural net inference (specifically when generating end-of-line tokens) and aspects of specific biological components of human perception being somewhat geometrically modellable. I didn’t include the entire context or a link to the substack in the OP because I didn’t care to, but here is the analogy in full:
The answer was: the AI represents various features of the line breaking process as one-dimensional helical manifolds in a six-dimensional space, then rotates the manifolds in some way that corresponds to multiplying or comparing the numbers that they’re representing. You don’t need to understand what this means, so I’ve relegated my half-hearted attempt to explain it to a footnote1. From our point of view, what’s important is that this doesn’t look like “LOL, it just sees that the last token was ree and there’s a 12.27% of a line break token following ree.” Next-token prediction created this system, but the system itself can involve arbitrary choices about how to represent and manipulate data.
Human neuron interpretability is even harder than AI neuron interpretability, but probably your thoughts involve something at least as weird as helical manifolds in 6D spaces.I searched the literature for the closest human equivalent to Claude’s weird helical manifolds, and was able to find one team talking about how the entorhinal cells in the hippocampus, which help you track locations in 2D space, use “high-dimensional toroidal attractor manifolds”. You never think about these, and if Claude is conscious, it doesn’t think about its helices either2. These are just the sorts of strange hacks that next-token/next-sense-datum prediction algorithms discover to encode complicated concepts onto physical computational substrate.
re: the bolded part, I like how explicitly cherry-picking neuroscience passes for peak rationalism.
I live in the Balkans, I have br-word privilege.
I like how even by ACX standards scoot’s posts on AI are pure brain damage
One level lower down, your brain was shaped by next-sense-datum prediction - partly you learned how to do addition because only the mechanism of addition correctly predicted the next word out of your teacher’s mouth when she said “three plus three is . . . “ (it’s more complicated than this, sorry, but this oversimplification is basically true). But you don’t feel like you’re predicting anything when you’re doing a math problem. You’re just doing good, normal mathematical steps, like reciting “P.E.M.D.A.S.” to yourself and carrying the one.
The most compelling analogy: this is like expecting humans to be “just survival-and-reproduction machines” because survival and reproduction were the optimization criteria in our evolutionary history. […] This simple analogy is slightly off, because it’s confusing two optimization levels: the outer optimization level (in humans, evolution optimizing for reproduction; in AIs, companies optimizing for profit) with the inner optimization level (in humans, next-sense-datum prediction; in AIs, next-token prediction). But the stochastic parrot people probably haven’t gotten to the point where they learn that humans are next sense-datum predictors, so the evolution/reproduction one above might make a better didactic tool.
He also threatens an Anti-Stochastic-Parrot FAQ.
Here’s hoping if this happens Bender et al enthusiastically point out this is coming from a guy whose long term master plan is to fight evil AI with eugenics. Or who uses the threat of evil AI to make eugenics great again if they are feeling less charitable.
Also being in a strategic partnership with fucking Palantir does tend to make one’s stand against mass surveillance seem less than genuine.
I mean, sure, but it’s still the CEO of XBOX on her second day on the job throwing her hat in the legendarily sus declining birthrates discourse in service of AI solutionism, it’s not nothing.
I really liked what Control did with cranking up the verisimilitude and the photorealism, namely to accentuate the uncanniness and really up the new weird vibe.