Very bad luddites

I’m so glad the Very Bad Wizards know there’s nothing to be concerned about when it comes to AI. Huge weight off my mind.

I hope the last couple of weeks have awoken them from their dogmatic slumbers.

A few things worth discussing:
The maths results. OpenAI has published a proposed AI-generated solution to the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, plus a major Euler-equation result. Obviously these deserve scrutiny, but we’re not talking about getting better at school algebra.
GPT-6’s benchmark results. OpenAI reports 98% on FrontierMath’s hardest tier and 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3. Benchmarks aren’t everything, but those seem worth acknowledging.
The Hugging Face incident. The recently published report describes AI agents bypassing isolation controls and compromising external systems. They were running with reduced safeguards, which matters, but that’s hardly reassuring.
AI helping build better AI. OpenAI says its systems can now handle defined research tasks that would take skilled researchers days, under human direction. That feedback loop seems like a pretty important part of this discussion.
Jacob Coxon leaving Anthropic, then describing the next year or two as “crunch time for humanity”. His judgement isn’t proof of anything, but the concern clearly isn’t confined to people who’ve watched too much Terminator.

I like Dave and Tamler, and they’re both obviously very intelligent. But on AI they sometimes sound like middle-aged stick-in-the-muds who decided it was all bollocks and would rather not revisit it.

I’m not asking them to become doomers or swallow every company’s PR. I’d just genuinely like to hear them reconsider this stuff.