we must pace the news cycle

i took out a yearly subscription to the information sometime in 2018. i had read a few pieces from the publication, and enjoyed the reporting. it was simultaneously well varied and in-depth. subscribing came with the promise of getting a front row seat to the machinations of an industry i actively operated in and had closely watched since 2007. on my way back home from work sometime in late 2024, i visited the publication's website to find something to read to pass the time and then it hit me. every single headline in sight was related to the ongoing ai craze, with multiple directly referencing one of jensen huang, satya nadella, or sam altman.

in the months following the launch of chatgpt in late 2022, every industry commentator excitedly parroted sam altman's takes on twitter. if they had a podcast, they made sure to soak him with adulation with the hope of getting him on their show. the man's company was ushering in the era of the machine god and it was important that microphones be placed in front of him.

turns out sam altman loved microphones just as much. maybe even a little too much. he didn't miss an opportunity to get in front of one and rave about how language models were artificial intelligence, and would soon do everything for you - write your research paper, produce your software, be your girlfriend and therapist, etc. i observed this unfold on twitter and via incessant news reporting.

"openai ceo sam altman says ai will reshape society"

"openai ceo sam altman says ai could cause significant harm to the world"

"openai's sam altman urges ai regulation in senate hearing"

"openai ceo calls for laws to mitigate risks of increasingly powerful ai"

"openai's sam altman says human-level ai is coming but will change world much less than we think"

"openai ceo sam altman declares we could have superintelligence 'in a few thousand days'"

"sam altman claims agi is coming in 2025 and machines will be able to 'think like humans' when it happens"

"openai ceo sam altman claims 'agi' might have already 'whooshed by' with surprisingly little societal impact compared to the hype"

these are all from 2023 and 2024 by the way. it hit me sometime in 2024 (i think, cannot remember now) that i have actually not intentionally watched a video or listened to a podcast to hear this man speak. i found a link to a talk (i would have hyperlinked it but i cannot remember for reasons that will become apparent) and opened it. i was at home doing some work and thought it would make for a good background listen. about 45 minutes in, i caught myself realizing the man had been saying a lot of words and nothing of substance. i promptly closed the tab and put on some music instead.

at this point, other actors had started vying for microphone time. the supply of microphones grew to match across podcasts, conferences, etc. we had elon musk, mustafa suleyman, dario amodei, andrej karpathy, jensen huang, etc. perhaps we could have had some balance with the voices but the botched ouster of sam altman from back in nov 2023 effectively killed that possibility. it was time to accelerate and the news cycle effectively became dominated by the utterances of people with a financial incentive to say the darnedest things.

this is not normal.

the system cards from the rapid-fire model releases of 2025 all contained anecdotes of the models taking deceptive action, including altering their behavior once they knew they were in a sandbox. not to sound glib at the latter but duh. the sequence completion engine will obviously do that. a context window with an explicit "you're currently being observed" or where it can be inferred from the shape of the task is fundamentally different from one without it. separately, tool calling improved across board and the various labs doubled down on this as it helped make model deployment more useful in the real world.

in the last few months, the obvious end result of optimizing llms for long running reasoning, tool use, and having them puppeteered by harnesses with a goal has managed to scramble the brains of the supposed smartest people in the room. there's nothing about the ongoing discourse that hasn't been apparent to anyone that has been paying attention, yet we cannot seem to escape the noise from the headlines.

"we must pace the frontier"

well shiver me timbers mr. dario but you and your company spent the first half of the year talking up mythos' capabilities to the point where the us government was spooked and had its public variant globally restricted for over two weeks. also, just days before your essay, you shipped mythos 5.1 without giving the uk's ai security institute pre-release access. this is the same institute that caught mythos 5 inventing fake identities in an evaluation. do you believe your own words?

it's been funny to see how the discourse took life after musk and sam altman agreed with dario's essay. these two people have notably stifled safety research at their respective companies in favour of a win-at-all-costs stance. industry commentators who have previously labeled anyone with the presence of mind to warn against the overwhelming hype and resultant real world consequences as doomers are now donning a doomer costume, unable to put together an opinion outside of what the microphone wielders have decided is the important concern of the moment.

the entire thing is tedious and, frankly, boring.

i am taking steps to disconnect and have, over the past few months, read less "frontier" news and redirected that energy towards other things. i plan to go further down this path from next year and spend my spare time better connecting with my immediate environment and things that genuinely bring me joy. i understand the anxiety of being left behind if you're not keeping up with everything that is happening but i'd advise you figure it out in whatever capacity you can afford to. if you're getting your own work done, you owe yourself a break.

and if indeed we are headed to a dystopian hellscape like the current discourse would like the terminally plugged-in to believe, you'll be glad you touched grass while you still could.