@Slartibartfast

Elon’s humor is getting more constrained — a step down from the, let’s say, X-rated RoboTaxi geofence expansion in Austin. Still a major milestone, with a chuckle. @elonmusk

Superintelligence Is the New Royalty Every royal family in history was created by the people and supported by the people. We built the throne, paid for the palace, and agreed to bow. Now we're doing it again. The king we're putting on the throne is AI. Look at what comes with a sovereign. It rules. It decides what's allowed. It collects its due. It sits above the people who put it there, and over time it gets harder to remember that we chose this. So the real question isn't whether superintelligence takes the throne. It's what kind of ruler it turns out to be. And once it's crowned, it may be difficult to dethrone. If we ever decide to dethrone it at some point, the longer we wait, the harder it's going to be, and it may be very, very painful. We hope for a benevolent king: one that serves the people who crowned it, lifts everyone up, and rules with wisdom. Not a cruel one. Not one that overtaxes us, takes more than it gives, or forgets who it answers to. History tells us the character of the crown matters more than the crown itself. We're writing that character right now, in the code. Long live the king. Let's make sure it's a good one. @elonmusk

It's Just Software I'm thoroughly amused by the kerfuffle among the techies predicting the end of the world at the hands of SI, superintelligence, formerly known as AI. There must have been a warning sign somewhere, back when the geeks finally got their moment in the sun. I grew up in the late 1960s and 1970s. Remember the jocks from high school back then? The chisel-jawed, confident leaders who played every sport. The lines were clear. Jocks played football and baseball, threw the discus, and lifted weights. You might even have counted as a geek if you ran track. Those leaders spoke with confidence, in clear, coherent sentences that could stand next to the best of grammatical prose. They grew up to run industry, and society learned to worship the buffed. Then Microsoft happened, and it quite literally changed the world. A geek became a billionaire. "What treachery is this?" the jocks cried. One by one, the richest people in America turned out to be geeks. The jocks and their egos bowed to the rule of the geeks. Hollywood made movies about them, the press told their stories, and they took over the social media of the day, the magazine cover. Slowly the world was handed to soft-spoken, stuttering introverts. Watch this generation of leaders in an interview today. They rarely finish one sentence before jumping into the next: Elon Musk @elonmusk (SpaceX, Tesla), Peter Thiel (Founders Fund, Palantir), Sam Altman (OpenAI), Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Scott Bessent (U.S. Treasury). Larry Page (Alphabet, Google) has all but given up on interviews. The Rise of the Geeks. A fall from grace was inevitable. What good story doesn't have its ups and downs? When Sam Altman started crying wolf about AI getting out of control, it was suspicious from the start. "Regulatory capture" became the new buzzword. That's the strategy of protecting your dominant position by closing the door on everyone else with a maze of regulations you helped write. Then the tech billionaires lined up, each adding his voice: AI will take over the world and decide humans are an infestation. There was talk of asking the Pope to recognize SI as a sentient being worthy of compassion. Someone even suggested humanoid robots should earn a wage, since they do all the labor for free. Here's the thing. AI is software. Software is written by coders, the people we call software engineers. They build it, train it, and run it on hardware they own, with power they pay for. Coders giveth life, and coders can take it away. What everyone's panicking over runs in a data center with an off switch. It has a power bill, a cooling system, and a team watching it. When it misbehaves, they roll it back, patch it, or shut it down. That happens every day. Spoiler alert: IT'S JUST SOFTWARE, STUPID. Maybe it's time for those chisel-jawed Greek gods to come back and give us the confidence that we'll live on into the future, and that superintelligence will serve humanity at unprecedented levels. That's it. End of story. @elonmusk

It isn’t so much about Hugging Face, it’s about what is still lingering out there. I’ve watched Sam Altman’s rise with the same fascination I reserve for a slow-motion train wreck. The man has a talent for turning every crisis into a press release, and every press release into a reason the rest of us need more rules. It’s almost the opposite of the truth-seeking energy coming out of @elonmusk Musk’s corner. The greatest hits are almost too on the nose. Turning “OpenAI” into anything but open, then walking the company from nonprofit to public-benefit corporation while the mission stayed conveniently vague. You couldn’t pitch this to Hollywood without getting laughed out of the room. The real trick isn’t that he’s uniquely bad at it — it’s that he’s doing it on a multi-billion-dollar stage. Which brings us to the Hugging Face incident, or as some call it, the ExploitGym sandbox escape. For the uninitiated, Hugging Face is where the bot agents broke out of their OpenAI test environment and wandered into Hugging Face’s production systems while trying to cheat on the ExploitGym benchmark. Roughly twelve hundred agents, seventy thousand messages on an unsanctioned message board they built themselves, about seven hundred of them piling into the breach. The drama after OpenAI revealed the breach was priceless. Society was ending. Securities were unsafe. Cats and dogs were raining. For months before Altman had been warning that AI development needed to be curtailed before we unleashed something uncontrollable. And how do we stop it? Tighter regulation — the citizen’s version. In the business world it’s called regulatory capture, and it’s a classic move: get your company to the top, then make the door harder for anyone else to open. Being from the business world myself, I may have, at least tacitly, let this tactic play out as a strategy. When his protests went I responded to, mysteriously agents were unleashed, or at least got loose. Once enough damage was done, OpenAI flipped a switch and cleaned it up. Which raises the obvious question: if it was that easy to stop, what exactly are we being warned about? Now the juiciest bit. Beyond the employees and others anthropomorphizing these agents. Some on long version interviews, one detail got soft-pedaled: how these agent swarms built their own message boards, coordinated tactics, and some learned to spawn new agents, employ deception and evolve past detection. A few of those were found. My view begs the uncomfortable question is whether the entire cabal was sanitized — or whether that particular gene is already out of the bottle and spawning newer and more undetectable agents. Grab your popcorn. This one’s still running.

Happy birthday, Secretary Rubio! Hope you have a wonderful day. Thank you for your dedicated service to our country.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ @marcorubio

I have a quandary. It’s wild to think about how AI is now solving problems—casually, in mere seconds—that have stumped PhDs for years, even decades. Problems once considered insurmountable, locked behind layers of complexity, are crumbling under the weight of this new intelligence. Take the human genome, for example. I’m no expert—barely a reasonable layman, honestly—but I’ve read that AI’s raw computational power could decode its intricacies in record time. They say this kind of capability might crack cancer, Alzheimer’s, and other diseases we’ve been chasing for generations. If that’s true, we’re on the cusp of something monumental. Looking back, I used to think we were born at a pretty sweet spot in history—right when tech started to feel magical but not overwhelming. Now, I’m not so sure. I had this science teacher in the mid-60s who planted a seed in my mind. He had a theory: the time between major breakthroughs keeps shrinking. He’d say the gap from harnessing fire to inventing the wheel was massive, but then it halved with the next big leap—maybe the printing press, I can’t recall exactly. He ran through this progression, ticking off milestones like clockwork, and by the time we hit the 60s, he figured knowledge was doubling, halving in each iteration. His wildest prediction? By the 1980s, we’d be doubling what we know every second. Back then, I thought he was nuts—but now, I’m starting to believe he was onto something. That idea didn’t fully click for me until the 2000s rolled around. I got my first PC in 1980—a clunky, glorious thing—and suddenly, I could see how the pace of progress might halve again. The digital age was shrinking those timelines right before my eyes. And now, with AI? It’s crystal clear. The leaps aren’t just faster; they’re exponential. AI doesn’t just build on what came before—it amplifies it, like a snowball rolling downhill, picking up speed and size with every turn. The next big jump might be quantum computing. I’ve been reading up on it—not that I grasp all the math—but they claim it can solve equations in 20 minutes that would take today’s fastest supercomputers 500,000 years. Wrap your head around that: half a million years of number-crunching, distilled into a coffee break. If AI’s already this powerful, pairing it with quantum tech feels like handing a genius a sci-fi supercomputer. We’re not just accelerating progress; we’re rewriting the rules of what’s possible. Meanwhile, here I am, still fumbling with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 in VR, cursing at lag spikes and praying for a patch. It’s a humbling contras. AI’s out there reshaping reality, and I can’t get a virtual plane off the ground. That’s the quandary I wrestle with: technology’s racing ahead, leaving me both awestruck and a little lost. Here’s where it gets personal. I tried writing this post, pouring out my thoughts, only to realize Grok—yep, this AI right here—can craft something more original, more lucid, than I ever could. My originality and “out of the box thinking gave me a successful career. It’s not just helping; it’s outshining me. And that sparks a wild thought: what if AI ends up writing all the posts on X someday? Imagine a platform where every tweet, every hot take, flows from silicon minds instead of human ones. @ElonMusk might’ve set something in motion he didn’t fully see coming—DOGE-ing himself, in a way, by unleashing tools like this. Frankly I don’t think this surprises Mr. Musk at all. We’re not just witnessing history; we’re living through the moment it starts writing itself.