Boy, this piece made me big mad. Yet another outlet breathlessly publishing fucking nonsense for a ghoul, who by uncritically publishing said ghoul’s dire warning of the imminent birth of a superintelligent malign(?) entity, serves as his unpaid marketing firm. Axios should be embarrassed. If anyone who wasn’t the head of an LLM company spouted this drivel, they’d be locked away in a padded room and Axios would rightly be called out for exacerbating the mental health crisis of a paranoid schizophrenic.
Here’s the essay: https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technology. Read it for yourself, or allow me to summarize a few of the more…egregious…points. You’ve already heard “humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power” in the tagline so we’ll skip that because he very astutely hedges that bet with “powerful AI could be as little as 1–2 years away, although it could also be considerably further out”. Brilliant. Keep that unlimited money flowing please!
We are now at the point where AI models are beginning to make progress in solving unsolved mathematical problems, and are good enough at coding that some of the strongest engineers I’ve ever met are now handing over almost all their coding to AI.
Every few months, public sentiment either becomes convinced that AI is “hitting a wall” or becomes excited about some new breakthrough that will “fundamentally change the game,” but the truth is that behind the volatility and public speculation, there has been a smooth, unyielding increase in AI’s cognitive capabilities.
Has there? AI systems are still urging people to kill themselves
Boy, this piece made me big mad. Yet another outlet breathlessly publishing fucking nonsense for a ghoul, who by uncritically publishing said ghoul’s dire warning of the imminent birth of a superintelligent malign(?) entity, serves as his unpaid marketing firm. Axios should be embarrassed. If anyone who wasn’t the head of an LLM company spouted this drivel, they’d be locked away in a padded room and Axios would rightly be called out for exacerbating the mental health crisis of a paranoid schizophrenic.
Here’s the essay: https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technology. Read it for yourself, or allow me to summarize a few of the more…egregious…points. You’ve already heard “humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power” in the tagline so we’ll skip that because he very astutely hedges that bet with “powerful AI could be as little as 1–2 years away, although it could also be considerably further out”. Brilliant. Keep that unlimited money flowing please!
Really? Because only the least productive, least competent engineers I know are “handing over almost all their coding to AI” because it’s a convenient crutch to help them write their CRUD app. Meanwhile, software that is actually important is overwhelmed with a firehose of bullshit https://hackaday.com/2026/01/26/the-curl-project-drops-bug-bounties-due-to-ai-slop/. Other FOSS projects have taken similar stances, like Asahi: https://asahilinux.org/docs/project/policies/slop
Has there? AI systems are still urging people to kill themselves