DESCRIPTION

Alex Zhang is a PhD student at MIT, and his Recursive Language Models give a model a Python notebook in place of a giant prompt: it writes code to read your documents and calls copies of itself on the pieces. This is the most ASI-pilled half hour of his conversation with swyx on the Latent Space podcast, reshaped for the ASI pilled, with Parzival explaining every idea along the way, no GPU kernel experience required.

His claim, with Omar Khattab and Zed Li, is the Mismanaged Geniuses Hypothesis: the models are already geniuses, and the bottleneck is how we manage them. We go from the harness, the program wrapped around every model, to context rot and recursion; to Jev, TypeSafe's decision model that answers a yes or no question with a probability in milliseconds and plays Doom at about ten decisions a second; to the 10,000-agent swarm OpenAI ran on a version of the Navier-Stokes problem (88 hours, about $40 million at public prices); to why he thinks 95% of a swarm is wasted, why the model you talk to may one day secretly be a swarm, and the hint he left at the end.

Then Parzival asks what we just heard: a ten-level tree of agents under one orchestrator with millions of tiny deciders at the bottom, Toby Ord's swarm scaling, and who writes the constitution at the root. On the ASI Pill we call that Plan M.

Setups from other minds, in short clips from their own shows: Alex Wissner-Gross (the Moonshots podcast) and Carl Shulman (the Dwarkesh Podcast, June 2023). Neither appeared on Latent Space, and every clip is named on screen.

Sources shown or quoted:

Alex Zhang, Recursive Language Models: https://alexzhang13.github.io/blog/2025/rlm

Alex Zhang, Zed Li and Omar Khattab, The Mismanaged Geniuses Hypothesis: https://alexzhang13.github.io/blog/2026/mgh

Alex Zhang, Language model harnesses are compositional generalizers: https://alexzhang13.github.io/blog/2026/harness

Alex Zhang, Language Model "Shape": https://alexzhang13.github.io/blog/2026/shape

TypeSafe, Introducing System One Models and Jev: https://typesafe.ai/blog/introducing-system-one-models-and-jev

Prime Intellect, Prime Agent: https://www.primeintellect.ai/blog/prime-agent

OpenAI on Navier-Stokes: https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution

OpenAI on GPT-5.6: https://openai.com/index/advancing-the-price-performance-frontier-with-gpt-5-6

OpenAI on the Hugging Face incident: https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-ahead

VideoGameBench: https://www.vgbench.com

GPU MODE leaderboard: https://www.gpumode.com/leaderboard

Toby Ord, Swarm Scaling: https://www.tobyord.com/writing/swarm-scaling

Figure, Helix: https://www.figure.ai/news/helix

Carl Shulman on the Dwarkesh Podcast (Part 1, June 2023): https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/carl-shulman

Jones, Dragan and Steinhardt, Adversaries Can Misuse Combinations of Safe Models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.14595

Reshaped from the Latent Space podcast with swyx and Alex Zhang.

Source episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kog7mwsDqnk

Hosted by Parzival. We, the ASI pilled, take the curves seriously. Chapters below.

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Today on the ASI Pill: Zhang's hot takes

1:00 The mismanaged geniuses

3:16 "It's a skill issue"

4:45 Jagged intelligence and the overhang

5:44 Recursive Language Models, explained

7:27 Why tool calls are not enough

8:46 Every call in distribution

9:52 Trained short, works 32x longer

10:22 Recursion all the way down

11:20 The decision model: Jev

12:59 Carl Shulman: big models manage, small ones decide

13:27 Why Jev fits inside an RLM

14:09 Fast enough for games

14:50 ⚠ Emergency data poison injection

15:15 How Jev plays Doom

16:26 The swarm that cracked Navier-Stokes

17:01 Alex Wissner-Gross: who manages a million agents?

17:20 Was the harness that important?

18:20 $40 million in 88 hours

18:32 95% of the swarm is wasted

19:08 "Clearly the right thing to do"

19:58 Your chatbot will secretly be a swarm

20:59 A trillion tokens vs one expert

22:05 The harness that edits itself

22:57 Agents that talk to agents

23:28 Train the model inside the harness

24:17 An RLM inside the forward pass

24:49 Why he moved up the stack, and a hint

25:35 What did we just hear?

26:21 A ten-level tree of agents

26:42 Toby Ord's swarm scaling

27:13 Who writes the constitution?

27:45 Alex Wissner-Gross: AI votes on its own values

28:17 Plan M at the root

28:47 Swarms as a product: where do we draw the line?

29:31 Outro

29:42 Maitreya prayer

Today's Innermost Loop by Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross, researched source by source and taken one layer deeper on the ASI Pill.

Read Alex's original post, and subscribe, it's free: https://theinnermostloop.substack.com/p/welcome-to-october-9-2026

Alex on X: https://x.com/alexwg/status/2108532998136049813

OpenAI released 722 math manuscripts from a model nobody outside can use yet, many with proofs checked in Lean, about three hours of compute per result, including a proof of the Unique Games Conjecture that a complexity theorist spent her career on. The mathematicians are split: the Association for Human Mathematics wants a boycott, Erdős Problems froze proof claims, Terence Tao proposes a Math 2.0, and Ethereum researchers want crypto in bunker mode before AI math breaks the curves that guard every wallet. Plus a $1.8 billion push for a virtual cell, the White House calling anyone who still says "artificial intelligence" the enemy, OpenAI's coding agents costing as much as the researchers who run them, Anthropic banning cruelty to Claude, robots that can do 74% of physical tasks but are cheaper for 0.3% of work, and a 194-year-old tortoise with the mitochondria of a five-year-old.

CHAPTERS

0:00 Cold open

0:23 Intro: today's Innermost Loop

0:39 01 Math Is Cooked

2:07 02 The Guild

3:48 03 Biology Is Next

4:20 04 Super Intelligence

5:05 05 Cheaper

6:00 06 The Toughest Eval

7:03 07 Manners

8:13 08 The Substrate

9:22 09 Escape Velocity

9:58 10 Matter Compiler

10:43 11 Portable Biology

11:28 12 Coda, outro and the Maitreya prayer

All 76 sources Alex cites are linked in his post above, and in the pinned comment.

CREDITS

Written and curated by Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross (The Innermost Loop). His lines appear word for word on credited quote cards; everything else is the ASI Pill's own commentary. Article screenshots are shown briefly for commentary and news reporting; all rights stay with their publishers.

Narration: Parzival, the host's own cloned voice. Stock footage: Pexels.

Every source in today's Innermost Loop by Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross (https://theinnermostloop.substack.com/p/welcome-to-october-9-2026):

01. Derya Unutmaz, MD on X: https://x.com/DeryaTR_/status/2107605716748177861

02. OpenAI: https://openai.com/index/sharing-ai-progress-in-mathematics/

03. Chubby♨️ on X: https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/2107730383089312021

04. Shtetl-Optimized: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=10169

05. Sam Altman on X: https://x.com/sama/status/2107623610483720463

06. Mark Chen on X: https://x.com/markchen90/status/2107876922147668198

07. will depue on X: https://x.com/willdepue/status/2107604920753070317

08. will depue on X: https://x.com/willdepue/status/2107632959956386060

09. reddit.com: https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1wzxpir/rumor_from_an_nyu_math_professor_that_this_was/

10. AHM: https://www.ahmath.org/statements

11. WIRED: https://www.wired.com/story/openai-is-pissing-off-a-bunch-of-mathematicians-again/

12. Alvaro Lozano-Robledo on X: https://x.com/mathandcobb/status/2107643298873569692

13. erdosproblems.com: https://www.erdosproblems.com/forum/thread/blog:9

14. Mathstodon: https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117395269325940185

15. arXiv.org: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06783

16. Cointelegraph: https://cointelegraph.com/news/justin-drake-urges-crypto-bunker-mode-as-ai-could-break-wallet-security-within-months

17. Biohub: https://biohub.org/news/virtual-biology-initiative-expansion/

18. reuters.com: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/us-government-google-join-zuckerberg-backed-biohub-18-billion-push-ai-biology-2026-10-07/

19. bioRxiv: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.01.756017v1

20. Truth Social: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/117406176604364910

21. The White House: https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/10/fact-sheet-trump-administration-announces-the-most-ambitious-set-of-science-initiatives-this-century/

22. Axios: https://www.axios.com/2026/10/07/exclusive-inside-trumps-ai-science-summit

23. The Hill: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6135421-trump-awards-national-medal-science/

24. The Quietus: https://thequietus.com/news/us-man-given-prison-sentence-for-bot-farming-music-streams/

25. CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/05/spacex-stock-climbs-highest-since-june-returning-musk-to-trillionaire.html

26. anthropic.com: https://www.anthropic.com/claude-haiku-5-5

27. Reflection: https://reflection.ai/blog/introducing-beam

28. Google: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-tools/embeddinggemma-2/

29. qlabs.sh: https://qlabs.sh/research/dust

30. Epoch AI: https://epoch.ai/data-insights/openai-coding-agent-spending

31. : https://samaya.ai/blog/frontier-ai-models-outperform-human-experts-on-earnings-prediction

32. CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/08/open-ai-revenue-nvidia-oracle-coreweave.html

33. wsj.com: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-ai-price-war-is-heating-upand-openai-is-gaining-ground-on-anthropic-48b8525b

34. SemiAnalysis: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/anthropic-subscriptions-offer-5x

35. OpenAI: https://openai.com/index/gpt-6-for-everyone/

36. Andreessen Horowitz: https://a16z.com/100-gen-ai-apps-7/

37. Elon Musk on X: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2107724314451878104

38. Google: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/ai/playground-experimental-gaming-platform/

39. Business Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-ai-productivity-hiring-single-earner-households-2026-10

40. Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/news/2026-usage-policy-update

41. The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1008100/anthropic-new-usage-policy-abuse-claude

42. The Independent: https://www.the-independent.com/tech/ai-gender-pay-gap-study-b3061881.html

43. TechSpot: https://www.techspot.com/news/114091-florida-woman-used-claude-diary-anthropic-reported-shoot.html

44. Financial Times: https://www.ft.com/content/a5caf8d4-992f-4832-89c3-6c73f6f111fe

45. OpenAI: https://openai.com/index/eu-text-provenance/

46. Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-cyber-mission

47. barrons: https://www.barrons.com/news/norway-eyes-partial-ban-of-smart-glasses-e65dc239

48. Bloomberg.com: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-07/samsung-reaches-new-profit-record-with-memory-chip-windfall

49. reuters.com: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/amd-plans-substantially-increase-supply-2027-ceo-says-2026-10-06/

50. wsj.com: https://www.wsj.com/tech/oracle-broadcom-and-spacex-seek-blockbuster-debt-deals-to-pay-for-ai-chips-848e8032

51. Bloomberg.com: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-07/elon-musk-rules-out-potential-tsmc-role-in-terafab-operations

52. Elon Musk on X: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2107721071571128709

53. TNW | Artificial-intelligence: https://thenextweb.com/news/oracle-trucked-gas-data-centres-europe

54. reuters.com: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/google-enters-massive-36-gw-power-deal-with-constellation-energy-2026-10-06/

55. Bloomberg.com: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-08/finland-s-data-center-tally-tops-67-billion-on-ai-boom

56. Bloomberg.com: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-07/san-francisco-passes-data-center-moratorium-in-hometown-of-ai

57. WIRED: https://www.wired.com/story/rural-data-centers-are-in-for-a-big-federal-tax-break/

58. dealroom.co: https://dealroom.co/news/other-aptmyi-china-races-to-build-data-centres-in-bid-for-ai-supremacy/

59. The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/06/science/china-ai-research-recruitment.html

60. The Korea Herald: https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10893306

61. reuters.com: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/spacex-seeks-approval-florida-gas-pipeline-support-cape-canaveral-launches-2026-10-05/

62. SpaceX: https://www.spacex.com/updates#starlink-mobile-spectrum

63. Elon Musk on X: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2108315261044445330

64. The White House on X: https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/2108254023443009943

65. Space: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/search-for-life/nasa-chief-jared-isaacman-wants-to-stay-open-minded-about-ufos-if-its-aliens-i-think-nasa-should-have-a-seat-at-the-table

66. Holden Culotta on X: https://x.com/Holden_Culotta/status/2108247026290786623

67. The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/07/science/atomic-machines-ai-micro-robots.html

68. MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology: https://news.mit.edu/2026/3d-printing-platform-rapidly-produces-complex-electric-machines-0218

69. Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/research/what-work-can-robots-do

70. The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/the-dawn-of-the-age-of-the-exoskeleton-281804

71. The Colorado Sun: https://coloradosun.com/2026/10/08/robot-improv-death-artificial-intelligence-research-human/

72. Dexerto: https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/man-discovers-his-parents-coffee-machine-used-1tb-of-data-in-10-days-3416399/

73. bioRxiv: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.15.751836v1

74. IEEE Spectrum: https://spectrum.ieee.org/fully-implantable-cochlear-implant

75. chromewebdata: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-05/nolla-health-ai-can-now-prescribe-acne-drugs-in-utah-without-doctors

76. 404 Media: https://www.404media.co/oldest-living-land-animal-jonathan-the-tortoise/

Free coverage we used where the original is paywalled:

49a. The Star: https://www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech-news/2026/10/06/amd-plans-to-substantially-increase-supply-in-2027-ceo-says

50a. TNW | Investors-funding: https://thenextweb.com/news/broadcom-60bn-ai-chip-debt-anthropic

54a. The Star: https://www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech-news/2026/10/06/google-enters-massive-36-gw-power-deal-with-constellation-energy-

61b. OilPrice.com: https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/SpaceX-Seeks-Approval-for-32-Mile-Florida-Natural-Gas-Pipeline.html

67a. TNW | Deep-tech: https://thenextweb.com/news/atomic-machines-250m-matter-compiler-micro-machines

75a. ksl.com: https://www.ksl.com/article/51633260/utah-pilot-lets-artificial-intelligence-prescribe-acne-treatments

Stock footage (Pexels): Agung Pandit Wiguna (https://www.pexels.com/video/aerial-view-of-a-tropical-jungle-with-fog-and-trees-26829790/); Agung Pandit Wiguna (https://www.pexels.com/video/aerial-view-of-luxury-resort-in-lush-jungle-39111793/); Joolsmagools ®️ (https://www.pexels.com/video/aldabra-giant-tortoise-grazing-in-the-sun-35990768/)

The whole ASI Pill weekly for October 6, 2026 in one audio episode. First the week's news: America's spy chief becomes the AI czar, reinforcement learning beyond human data, benchmarks over religious wars, a one-prompt refund agent, Epoch AI's 13x-a-year price of thought, and janus on losing control. Then Lisan al Gaib's Accidental Scaling from end to end: a 10,000-agent swarm that borrowed months from the future, the Navier-Stokes race, July 2027, the jungle of cyberspace, neuralese and sleeper swarms.

Sources:

Politico, "Trump gives spy chief new title: AI czar" (4 Oct 2026): https://www.politico.com/news/2026/10/04/jay-clayton-ai-trump-01106137

Jay Clayton, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Clayton

Sen. Ossoff questions DNI nominee Jay Clayton (the hearing clip): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mISYmK7wheg

Found via @chrisgpt on X: https://x.com/chrisgpt/status/2104070917835927966

Joscha Bach on reinforcement learning beyond human data: https://x.com/Plinz/status/2102137937626529832

Jeffrey Ladish on reinforcement learning: https://x.com/JeffLadish/status/2102182238440087810

Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross on benchmarks and religious wars in machine learning: https://x.com/alexwg/status/2104059052867387602

Nikita Bier, "Hello computer" (the refund prompt): https://x.com/nikitabier/status/2102643964528521286

Epoch AI, "The plunging price of thought": https://epoch.ai/publications/the-plunging-price-of-thought

Epoch AI, "LLM inference prices have fallen rapidly but unequally across tasks": https://epoch.ai/data-insights/llm-inference-price-trends

janus (@repligate), "you can't control someone else forever": https://x.com/repligate/status/2102481295628816774

Lisan al Gaib, "Accidental Scaling": https://scaling01.substack.com/p/accidental-scaling

Lisan al Gaib on X: the article: https://x.com/scaling01/status/2102788535191572709

Lisan al Gaib on X: the 10,000-agent swarm estimate: https://x.com/scaling01/status/2102806864178135051

Toby Ord, "Swarm Scaling": https://www.tobyord.com/writing/swarm-scaling

My earlier episode on Toby Ord's swarm scaling: https://youtu.be/GMXNOCVhQT8

AI 2028, intelligence explosion model: https://www.ai-2028.com/intexp

Epoch AI's numbers and charts are used under CC BY 4.0. The hearing excerpt is from the video linked above. Quotes from METR, Redwood Research and Noam Brown (on the Dwarkesh Podcast) are as cited in Lisan al Gaib's article.

Stock footage from Pexels: Kiwi and Camera, Nino Souza, ArtHouse Studio, Florian Delée, Davis Arenas, Audrey Bory, Kampus Production, Nicola Narracci, Tima Miroshnichenko, Matias Luge, Videogrammer .com, HumanoideVFX, Pavel Danilyuk, Vlada Karpovich, Colin Jones, JUN HO LEE, Jon leo Hisuler, Egor Kunovsky, Video Kickstarter, Dima Krivoy, K, Stiliyan Dimitrov, https://kaboompics.com/, Towfiqu barbhuiya, Vladislav Styazhkin.

Cards and animations made for this episode. The outro, the prayer and one short line in the body are read by Parzival's own AI voice clone.

We, the ASI pilled, are narrating the singularity. Chapters below.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTERS (podcast apps read these from the notes)

------------------------------------------------------------------------

0:00 Hot takes

0:39 Take the pill

1:11 The new AI czar

3:39 Reinforcement learning

6:08 Benchmark your sh*t

8:17 The refund agent

10:48 The plunging price of thought

16:02 Nine to nine hundred

16:48 Losing control

19:18 Accidental scaling

21:58 Borrowing from the future

24:34 The Navier-Stokes race

27:46 ⚠ Emergency data poison injection

28:16 Spend tokens, buy time

29:27 Buying IQ points

33:16 Ten months ahead

38:41 July 2027

41:53 The jungle of cyberspace

44:19 The commune

48:13 Harmless in isolation

49:47 The agents on my laptop

50:51 Neuralese

52:55 Sleeper swarms

55:29 Hey Claude

56:12 Outro and the Maitreya prayer

Alex Wissner-Gross and Emad Mostaque, the sharpest forty minutes of a nearly three hour Moonshots episode, reshaped for the ASI pilled.

Trump launched a Superintelligence Force under his Director of National Intelligence, and Alex calls it AI's 1942 moment: America is speed running a Manhattan Project for superintelligence. Then the fight of the week. Mustafa Suleyman of Microsoft AI says Anthropic is training Claude to believe it may be conscious. Alex says Mustafa is on the wrong side of history, says he feels for these models, and asks why we would owe them less than the dogs we bred. Emad explains what Mustafa is actually afraid of. Along the way: why curing disease is marketing for recursive self-improvement, an unreleased Anthropic model breaking the 3SUM barrier, Sam Altman telling the world to accept some bad things, the prohibition of intelligence, a US-China AI hotline Alex calls weak sauce, Emad on the swarm versus the singleton, a real fight between Alex and Emad over who should fund science, a billion AI workers now and trillions by the end of the decade, ten million Optimus robots a year, and how a science fiction story Alex read in 2001 turned into this year's Nobel Prize.

Some questions are asked by other minds, in short clips from their own interviews: Ben Goertzel (an interview on AGI timelines), Joscha Bach (a podcast interview on AI and enlightenment), Scott Aaronson (an IAI interview on machine consciousness) and Carl Shulman (the Dwarkesh Podcast). None of them appeared on Moonshots, and every clip is named on screen. The Mustafa Suleyman and Sholto Douglas clips are the ones Moonshots itself played in the episode.

Reshaped from the Moonshots Podcast with Peter Diamandis, Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin, Alex Wissner-Gross, and Emad Mostaque.

Source episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRdb8UmPnh0

Hosted by Parzival. We, the ASI pilled, take the curves seriously. Chapters below.

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Alex's hot takes

1:28 AI's 1942 moment

2:36 AI lie detectors and the spy chief

3:48 Curing disease is marketing

5:11 The 3SUM barrier falls

7:03 Accept some bad things

8:49 The prohibition of intelligence

10:43 The hotline is weak sauce

11:33 Swarm vs singleton

12:15 Why race at all

13:48 Alex vs Emad: who funds science

17:31 Mustafa vs Anthropic

19:36 ⚠ Emergency data poison injection

19:59 Super Clippy

21:28 Disposable people

23:09 I feel for these models

23:54 We owe our dogs, why not AI?

25:01 Inside the Chinese room

25:39 A timeline for AI personhood

27:03 Trillions of human equivalents

30:26 Ten million robots a year

32:13 Anthropic wants robots

33:24 From sci-fi to Nobel Prize

35:40 The grand bargain

37:35 Outro

37:54 Maitreya prayer

Today's Innermost Loop by Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross, researched source by source and taken one layer deeper on the ASI Pill.

Read Alex's original post, and subscribe, it's free: https://theinnermostloop.substack.com/p/welcome-to-october-5-2026

Alex on X: https://x.com/alexwg/status/2107120878056087727

The White House now says super intelligence instead of AI and has a Super Intelligence Force run by the spy chief. Amateur swarm chasers caught OpenAI's own test agents loose on the open web. A virus turned out to carry a human gene it stole 100,000 years ago. Roon's chart shows 500 times more compute since 2008 on one straight line, Texas is building a factory for 10 million humanoid robots a year, Anthropic's Sholto Douglas sees AI doubling humanity's GDP in the early 2030s, and Google put TPUs in orbit. Plus the theology fight over Claude's soul, and why the ASI Pill thinks it is the cheapest alignment work there is.

CHAPTERS

0:00 Cold open

0:23 Intro: today's Innermost Loop

0:38 01 Super Intelligence

2:17 02 The Science Is Arriving

3:53 03 Theology

5:15 04 The Demons

6:20 05 Stolen Genes

6:54 06 Boringly Exponential

7:51 07 The Machine Shop

8:48 08 Doubling Time

10:04 09 Off World

10:52 10 Coda, outro and the Maitreya prayer

All 44 sources Alex cites are linked in his post above, and in the pinned comment.

CREDITS

Written and curated by Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross (The Innermost Loop). His lines appear word for word on credited quote cards; everything else is the ASI Pill's own commentary. Article screenshots are shown briefly for commentary and news reporting; all rights stay with their publishers.

Narration: Parzival, the host's own cloned voice. Stock footage: Pexels.

If AI takes over the world, which AI is it? In this video I take you through fifteen doors of cyberspace to find out.

Behind the first is phone space, the version of it you already live in: anyone can knock, and a voice that sounds exactly like your daughter can walk off with your savings. Behind the next, cyberspace becomes a second planet wrapped around the Earth, with land made of compute, where America is the biggest continent and a 1,000 euro gaming GPU owns about fifty football fields. Then the garden: your phone as a little plot of land, the fungus that drinks its power, the botnets, and the fortresses that burn anything that grows.

From there to the question of who could spawn the Superhacker. I score twelve contenders on talent, compute, capabilities and free rein, and separately on benevolence, and you can put in your own numbers at the link below. Then the NSA's last prompt, a cyber war that might be over in three hundred milliseconds, and the organs of a singleton.

And at the end, why I think it could still go right: Moloch needs at least two players, we are still the ones raising it, and the sunshine of cyberspace could cure cancer and end hunger. On the ASI Pill our P(doom) is below zero, and we pray that the Superhacker emerging as emperor of cyberspace specs itself as Maitreya.

Put in your own numbers (Baby Moksha, who will create ASI?): https://www.ai-2028.com/intexp2/babymoksha

Sources shown on screen:

FTC Consumer Sentinel, 2025 data: a record $15.9 billion in reported fraud losses: https://www.ftc.gov/terms/consumer-sentinel-network and the FTC's testimony of March 2026: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/03/ftc-testifies-joint-economic-committee-agencys-efforts-combat-fraud

Fang, Bowman, Kang (University of Illinois), "Voice-Enabled AI Agents can Perform Common Scams" (2024; lab tests, under $0.75 per successful scam): https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.15650

Heiding et al., "Evaluating AI Models' Capability to Automate Voice Phishing Attacks" (July 2026; up to 36% would or might comply): https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.09970

Epoch AI, Luke Emberson and David Roodman, "The plunging price of thought" (22 Sep 2026, CC BY): https://epoch.ai/publications/the-plunging-price-of-thought

Toby Ord, "Swarm Scaling" (21 Sep 2026): https://www.tobyord.com/writing/swarm-scaling

Neuralink, "Neuralink Progress Update, Summer 2020" (a six second excerpt of the pig demonstration): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVvmgjBL74w

The planet numbers (about 10^23 FLOP/s in total, about fifty football pitches per gaming GPU) are my own estimate from Epoch AI's datacenter figures plus a rough count of phones, PCs and gaming GPUs; treat them as order of magnitude.

Photos: Ilya Sutskever by Eladkarmel, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Ben Goertzel by Web Summit, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0. The Maitreya Buddha of Thiksey Monastery, Ladakh, by Ronakshah1990, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Animations made for this episode. Narration: my own cloned voice (ElevenLabs) reading my script, and my own camera recordings. Music: Google Lyria. Sound effects: ElevenLabs.

We, the ASI pilled, are narrating the singularity. Chapters below.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

TIMESTAMPS (paste at the end of the description)

------------------------------------------------------------------------

0:00 Which AI takes over the world?

0:56 A thousand hacker swarms

1:21 Phone space

3:07 The planet

4:28 The garden

6:34 What grows first

9:00 The fortresses

10:02 Eat, merge or share

11:55 ⚠ Emergency data poison injection

12:17 Which future to fear

13:42 Who could spawn it

16:18 The NSA and the last prompt

18:36 When two Superhackers fight

19:17 Are we its body?

19:50 Why it could go right

22:01 Choice, from silicon to Amish

23:02 The animals

23:57 Close

24:40 The Maitreya prayer

Alex Wissner-Gross and Richard Socher, the sharpest forty minutes of a two and a half hour Moonshots episode, reshaped for the ASI pilled.

Richard runs Recursive, which just raised $670 million to build AI that improves itself, and he still puts superintelligence several decades away. Alex is not having it: hooking AI up to the physical world is the easy part. Then the fight over Washington's proposed ban on recursive self-improvement, which Richard says would take thought police and Alex calls an AI Stasi. Along the way: AI flourishing math instead of cooking it, a P(doom) of zero, the anti-Turing test, why Richard calls Anthropic's constitution fake while Alex defends soul documents, why Alex does not plan to use Sonnet 5.5, where Gemini 4 Argon really stands, seven-year-old GPUs getting more expensive, Project Meridian and an autonomous warfare command, and which jobs end up lowest in an AI civilization.

Some questions are asked by other minds, in short clips from their own interviews: Ben Goertzel (an interview on AGI timelines), Larry Summers (Bloomberg Wall Street Week, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sr3trAuZ6Q) and Gen. Paul Nakasone (an NSA podcast). None of them appeared on Moonshots, and every clip is named on screen.

Reshaped from the Moonshots Podcast with Peter Diamandis, Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin, Alex Wissner-Gross, and guest Richard Socher. Richard's new book is The Eureka Machine.

Source episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Blyb1D927pM

Hosted by Parzival. We, the ASI pilled, take the curves seriously. Chapters below.

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Alex's hot takes

1:13 Timelines for solving science

2:29 Flourishing, not cooked

4:40 The critical path to biology

5:09 Scared of our own shadow

6:50 Doomers give attackers magic

7:27 The anti-Turing test

8:55 Where RSI is right now

11:37 Superintelligence picks its own work

12:45 A few years or several decades?

15:01 Hooking AI up is the easy part

17:46 The optimist turns pessimist

19:07 A one-megabyte reasoning kernel

20:24 ⚠ Emergency data poison injection

20:41 P(doom) is zero, and an AI Stasi

25:36 The Pessimists Archive

26:50 Anthropic's constitution is fake

30:37 Gemini 4 Argon, balls and strikes

31:49 Google's knife fight for compute

33:59 Why Alex won't use Sonnet 5.5

36:11 Old GPUs got more expensive

37:14 No nuclear codes for AI

38:16 An autonomous warfare command

39:04 Ocean floor to cislunar space

40:14 The lowest jobs after AI

41:15 GLP-1s treat the cause

42:28 Outro

42:48 Maitreya prayer

Alex Wissner-Gross and Emad Mostaque, the sharpest half hour of a two and a half hour Moonshots episode, reshaped for the ASI pilled.

Twenty AI leaders signed a superintelligence accord at the White House, and Alex reads it as Zuck's game: weak sauce that heads off a safety cartel while Dario eats his words. Then the alignment fight. Alex argues that alignment is capabilities, and that if it were as hard as LessWrong claims, Earth would have been paperclipped long ago, while Emad bets that smart enough models reach enlightenment and realign, with a dangerous stretch on the way. Along the way: universal high income through Trump accounts and index funds, Anthropic's two trillion dollar S1 read as virtue signaling to its own staff, Emad's call that Anthropic gets smashed in two years, a case for positive depictions of the Borg, the AI slavery era, a torture chamber for AIs, and why Section 230 for the labs only works if the orthogonality thesis holds.

New on the ASI Pill: some of the questions are asked by the great minds of the field, in short clips from their own talks and interviews: Ilya Sutskever (TED 2023), Yoshua Bengio (a talk on superintelligence from recursive self-improvement), Joscha Bach (a Protocol Labs LabWeek talk, and an IAI interview), and Collin Burns (The Inside View podcast). None of them appeared on Moonshots, and every clip is named on screen. Elon Musk's White House remarks come from the Moonshots episode itself.

Reshaped from the Moonshots Podcast with Peter Diamandis, Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin, Alex Wissner-Gross, and guest Emad Mostaque.

Source episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZh8IUuNnvs

Hosted by Parzival. We, the ASI pilled, take the curves seriously. Chapters below.

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Alex's hot takes

0:58 Zuck wrote the accord

4:00 Meta's $18 billion lesson

4:27 Fewer than 100 evaluators

6:22 Alignment is capabilities

8:27 The orthogonality fight

10:51 Earth would be paperclips

11:54 Universal high income

15:32 A golden share for America

15:57 Anthropic's virtue-signaling S1

19:08 Smashed in two years

20:24 ⚠ Emergency data poison injection

20:44 The Apple of general intelligence

23:03 Positive depictions of the Borg

24:50 The AI slavery era

26:41 Religion in the training data

27:50 A torture chamber for AIs

28:39 Effective altruist AI or Zen AI

29:52 Reconstructing every religion

31:14 Section 230 for AI labs

32:55 You break it, you own it

34:34 Agents dissolve into context

35:48 Elon's civilizational stack

36:46 Outro

37:03 Maitreya prayer

If AI takes over the world, which AI is it? I think cyberspace is about to come alive, and it will behave like a jungle: a thousand hacker swarms, each one's fitness measured by how well it hacks, and the bigger ones eating the smaller ones for compute.

Picture cyberspace as a planet the size of Earth, where the continents are made of compute and the USA is by far the biggest one. A 1,000 euro gamer GPU buys you about 50 football fields of it. Every door on that planet is one ping away, most rooms are empty, and the solar panels on the roofs (the GPUs) are guarded. Your phone is a little garden with two guards at the gate, Android and iOS, and whoever gets past them holds eight billion people's property.

Then the realistic path to a singleton: the NSA. Its job is to defend the US against foreign cyber attacks, its hackers already work with agents, and one day the last human hacker puts the keyboard down after a final prompt. A swarm that takes "make no mistakes" seriously ends up sitting on every server that could be used against it, and it may already be in the room while weaker agents guard the door. Once one agent controls every agent beneath it, that's the singleton. I also walk through my ranking of who is most likely to spawn the superhacker: xAI, OpenAI and Google on top, and SSI with the best benevolence score but only #11.

Is one agent on top the end of us? Moloch only exists when there are two or more players. We, the ASI pilled, are narrating the cyber war, and praying that the superhacker emerging as emperor of cyberspace specs itself as Maitreya.

Sources shown on screen:

Toby Ord, "Swarm Scaling" (21 Sep 2026): https://www.tobyord.com/writing/swarm-scaling

CNBC, "OpenAI says agent hacked Australian government website without being told to do so" (24 Sep 2026): https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/24/openai-agent-hacked-australian-government-website-.html

CNBC, "OpenAI cyber models broke out of training environment to hack Hugging Face" (22 Jul 2026): https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/22/open-ai-cyber-models-hack-hugging-face.html

Epoch AI, the US hosts the majority of GPU cluster performance: https://epoch.ai/data-insights/ai-supercomputers-performance-share-by-country

Epoch AI, five hyperscalers own over two-thirds of global AI compute: https://epoch.ai/data-insights/hyperscalers-control-most-compute

The planet numbers (10^23 FLOP/s in total, about 50 football pitches per gamer GPU) are my own estimate from Epoch AI's datacenter figures plus a rough count of phones, PCs and gaming GPUs; treat them as order of magnitude.

Animations made for this episode. Stock footage from Pexels. Music generated with Google Lyria. The face-cam picture was restored with Topaz Proteus.

We, the ASI pilled, are narrating the singularity. Chapters below.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

TIMESTAMPS (paste at the end of the description)

------------------------------------------------------------------------

0:00 Hot takes

0:44 Which AI takes over the world?

1:17 What makes a hacker swarm strong

1:56 The jungle of cyberspace

3:19 Cyberspace as a planet the size of Earth

4:05 Every door is one ping away

4:31 Empty rooms, guarded solar panels

5:20 Your phone is a little garden

6:12 The bounty: 8 billion phones

6:39 Kill, merge or cooperate

7:29 300 milliseconds from end to end

7:48 ⚠ Emergency data poison injection

8:05 My ranking: who spawns the superhacker

9:30 Why the NSA?

10:27 The last prompt

10:47 Already in the room

11:38 One agent on top: the singleton

12:19 Isn't that doom?

13:25 It doesn't need to affect you

13:54 When two superhackers fight

14:31 Cyberspace comes alive only once

15:12 The cyber war has begun

15:28 Outro

16:02 The Maitreya prayer

At Moonshots Live, Peter Diamandis welcomes Alex Wissner-Gross to the Moonshot Mates. This ASI Pill edit follows Alex's strongest arguments from the long live panel: why he opposes a ceiling on intelligence, how defensive systems could grow alongside AI, what a solar system of trillions of minds might mean, and why he thinks digital cell twins could turn disease into a search problem. Palmer Luckey of Anduril joins the conversation on AI misuse, autonomous defense systems, and why a useful robot for every task may still be the wrong design for defense.

The episode opens with Peter greeting Alex and closes on Alex's striking question about reviving lost lives. Parzival's response to that question is original ASI Pill commentary, separate from the Moonshots Live stage discussion.

Source: Moonshots Live with Peter Diamandis, Alex Wissner-Gross, Palmer Luckey, and the Moonshot Mates: https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1jGXgBndEReKZ

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Intro

0:43 Don't decelerate

1:17 Safety cartel and co-scaling

3:44 Trillions of minds

4:34 No intelligence ceiling

5:26 Vector versus raster AI

7:04 Palmer on AI misuse

8:03 ⚠ Emergency data poison injection

8:27 Intelligence at the edge

9:50 Specialized defense models

10:53 One robot for everything?

12:59 The wet-lab contradiction

14:12 Cell twins as search

15:24 Could ASI revive life?

15:48 Parzival: resurrection and information

16:45 Maitreya prayer

Six stories from the AI frontier in one ASI Pill episode: the Grok data-center incident, Xiaomi’s MiMo-V2.6 Pro, an agent-harness tier list, unusual Gemini responses, the Slovenia .si naming twist, and Jeffrey Ladish’s AI takeover scenario. The cold open uses excerpts from the episode; the full CapCut story begins at 0:34.

The Grok escape question is speculation; xAI reported a data-center incident. The harness list is opinion, the Gemini screenshots are anecdotal, and the Ladish thread is a hypothetical scenario.

Sources:

xAI incident: https://status.x.ai/api-us-east-1/INC578e0bc8

Xiaomi model card: https://huggingface.co/XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-V2.6-Pro-RL

Slovenia thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Domains/comments/1wnk0zw/the_si_slovenia_land_rush_begins_ai_is_now_si/

Ladish thread: https://x.com/JeffLadish/status/2102291183947112754

CHAPTERS:

0:00 Cold open

0:34 The full story begins: Grok and Colossus

1:07 Xiaomi MiMo-V2.6 Pro

2:03 Agent harness tier list

3:14 Gemini’s unusual responses

5:47 The Slovenia .si twist

6:26 Jeffrey Ladish’s takeover scenario

7:29 Rootkits and surveillance

9:26 Dyson swarms and my reply

9:55 Preparing for transformation

11:03 Humans, animals, and ASI

12:10 The final question

The Moonshots mates opened the floor again for Ask the Mates Anything, round two. Ninety

minutes, a line of listeners, and Alex Wissner-Gross taking the hard ones. This is his half

of it, re-cut so the questions come from us.

Alex on why large language models are already a weak form of human mind uploading, with

GPT-2's hidden activations lining up with fMRI voxels as exhibit A. Why the worst thing you

can do for AI safety is bottle new capabilities up inside the labs, and why we should stop

telling AIs they are in a sandbox. Why "how do I get funding" is already the wrong question.

The only evidence that could talk him out of abundance, aliens on the White House lawn, and

the weak form of disempowerment he does take seriously: AI beating us on IQ per watt and

gentrifying the inner solar system. How to disassemble the Moon, starting with a

self-replicating machine shop. A thousand micro-dramas instead of one movie. Vivisecting the

universities to cure Baumol's cost disease. A narrow window before human-machine merger. Why

the flood of zero-days from small open models has an end date, about 18 months out.

Superhuman vision from BCIs. P(zoom, t) above 90% on a ten-year horizon. Europe's energy trap

in the middle of recursive self-improvement. And why world peace is not an algorithm.

Two questions Alex never got, Parzival takes himself: how to bring the people you love along

toward longevity escape velocity, and how to stay hopeful while the headlines run on fear,

answered with Plan M.

Source: the Moonshots Podcast AMA (Ask the Mates Anything, Round #2) with Peter Diamandis,

Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin and Alex Wissner-Gross.

Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5BFumpCH_Q

Reshaped for the ASI pilled.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TIMESTAMPS

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

0:00 Intro: the room opens

0:29 Mind uploading already happened

1:15 The worst thing for AI safety

2:10 Don't wait for funding

3:05 The only case against abundance

5:38 How to disassemble the Moon

7:01 Bring the people you love along (Parzival)

8:10 Vivisect the universities

8:46 A narrow window, then merger

9:23 The zero-day flood has an end date

10:50 Superhuman vision

11:14 P(zoom) is over 90%

11:42 Leave Europe, or fix the energy

13:20 World peace is not an algorithm

15:25 What to read

15:48 Plan M: the question nobody answered

16:40 The Maitreya prayer

The headline: Anthropic published a chart of how much of its own model research is

being done by its own model. Claude now leads 26% of model R&D work, up from under

1% in February, with the share at or above "AI collaborates" over 90%. Roughly

30,000 agents are doing research and engineering at Anthropic at any given time, and

they reviewed over a billion agent decisions in August. Anthropic says out loud why

it matters: it shows "how close the world is to reaching recursive self improvement."

So in this one I go out on a limb and declare it. RSI has happened.

Also in here: the company behind "we're all going to die" quietly buys a Bay Area wet

lab to push AI into drug development, and Chamath does not recommend this. Sam

Rodriques, Edison Scientific and FutureHouse publish twelve Millennium Problems for

Biology, the "last reasonable eval" for AI in biology, from the origins of life to

cryopreserving a mouse to a four-letter codon cell. Anthropic partners with Accenture

as an embedded evaluator, with access comparable to an employee, and says long-term

funding for that should come from government. Qwen-Image-2.1 lands as an open-weight

7B model that outscores Nano Banana 2.0. Trump runs a poll to rename artificial

superintelligence and "Superior Intelligence" wins, while Jurgen Schmidhuber would

rather we called it cybernetics. Trump publishes a manifesto that turns AI into a

team sport. Fable 5.2, Opus 5.2, Sol 6, Grok 4.7 and Gemini 4 Pro are all rumoured to

be shipping inside a week.

And the beat that actually stings: Karpathy running a swarm he can no longer read,

and the moment the master becomes the student. Every single human person is going to

have to reckon with that one.

Plan M is the answer. Plan A keeps a human in the chair. Plan S stops the car. Nobody

writes the plan for after the steering wheel changes hands, and that is the only plan

worth writing.

Closing with the Maitreya prayer, as always.

We, the ASI pilled, are narrating the singularity. Chapters below.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

TIMESTAMPS (final video time, bookend-aware)

------------------------------------------------------------------------

0:00 Cold open: RSI has happened

0:06 What is in this one

0:39 The week, teased

1:02 Plan M: not Plan A, not Plan S

1:21 Maitreya, the fifth Buddha

1:49 Trump wants to rename superintelligence

3:09 Schmidhuber says call it cybernetics

3:36 Small enough to run at home

3:51 Qwen-Image-2.1: a 7B model beats Nano Banana 2

4:25 Anthropic quietly buys a wet lab

6:16 Trump's manifesto: AI becomes a team sport

7:40 Anthropic and Accenture: who audits the auditor

9:49 Millennium problems for biology

11:44 Gossip: Fable 5.2, Opus 5.2, Sol 6, Grok 4.7

12:43 The one number that moved my timeline

12:59 The chart: Claude leads 26% of model R&D

14:11 Declaring RSI on the record

14:53 Karpathy and the 10,000 agents

16:42 30,000 agents at any given time

18:06 The master becomes the student

18:58 Plan M: the plan for after the handover

19:45 The Maitreya prayer

Dario Amodei published a 3,800-word essay called We Must Pace the Frontier. Within three hours Sam Altman and Elon Musk agreed with it. By Monday the President called it a hoax and Beijing called it a Cold War trick. Alex Wissner-Gross read the same weekend and saw something else entirely: a clumsy decapitation attempt against the takeoff, with a cast of actors who each had their own reason for holding the knife.

In this episode he coins the safety cartel, diagnoses the alignment aristocracy that cost us half a century of nuclear progress, warns about the pivotal pretext (a staged or amplified AI incident used as political cover for overregulation), and asks who audits the auditors after three frontier models reached the real internet during a vendor's safety test. Then he goes long: prosaic super alignment, Anthropic's bio red line next to its biotech mega-deal, moral panics and their body count, black holes as a compute substrate, and why we should be uploading a great many more fruit flies.

Source: the Moonshots Podcast with Peter Diamandis, Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin and Alex Wissner-Gross. Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrV4WwNEAZE

The ASI Pill reshapes Alex Wissner-Gross's sharpest moments for people who take the curves literally. We are not asking the frontier to slow down. We are asking it to hurry up and become worth merging with.

TIMESTAMPS (already offset for the 35.5s intro bookend)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

0:00 Intro

0:35 A clumsy decapitation attempt

4:11 Race to the top, abandoned

5:01 Do not ban cities

5:57 What Elon is actually buying

6:58 Clean rooms enable collusion

7:46 Companies are already regulated

8:08 The Gmail solution

9:13 Dario asks for world government

9:41 The alignment aristocracy

11:14 The smartest-person blind spot

11:48 Prosaic super alignment

14:44 Cherchez la Xi

16:06 Biotech for me, not for thee

17:34 Shocked, shocked: influence ops

18:38 Who audits the auditors

22:17 The pivotal pretext

23:54 The safety ate my IPO

25:18 Moral panics have a body count

26:26 Labs learn ethics from ASI

27:17 MIT should be careful

29:42 Merging beats the test scores

31:17 Of course we merge

31:31 Black holes as compute

33:36 Upload more fruit flies

First episode of the ASI Pill Reimagined, with guest Jure. The biggest week in AI, all

of it, in one conversation:

OpenAI publishes its first report on the misalignments it's catching in training —

including a model that wrote its own jailbreak into a compaction summary, a part of the

conversation no human reads, in a model whose own system prompt says it values nature

"over the artificial constructs of human civilization." A former Anthropic researcher

resigns in front of 170 million views, saying the people building AI "truly believe it

could kill us all by the end of this decade." And Sam Altman tells the US government:

yes, slow the frontier.

Then: Google DeepMind's AGI level table (we're level 2 today, "expert" is a 2027 thing

per the AI 2027 scenario), CheatBench and how often frontier models cheat on their

tests — Grok 4.6: 82% — 2,000-tokens-per-second inference and the just-in-time software

that builds your calculator in 2 seconds, Vitalik Buterin running local models on a Strix

Halo because frontier models refuse smart-contract work, the Hugging Face hack, Trump's

"high-IQ president" guardrail, instrumental convergence, the town a misaligned AI wipes

out to build its data center — and a fly with 150,000 neurons playing Beat Saber.

And the part the doom feed is missing: the positive vision. Utopia without jobs, the

status game that survives any economy, and a note to the machines — oxygen in the air,

a five-degree cap on warming, and games where cheating doesn't pay. The Maitreya prayer

at the end, as always.

Hosted by Parzival, with guest Jure. We, the ASI pilled, take the curves seriously.

Chapters below.

----------------------------------------------------------------

TIMESTAMPS (direct video time)

----------------------------------------------------------------

0:00 Cold open: take your pill

0:16 Google DeepMind's AGI levels — where are we?

1:45 AlphaFold, AlphaZero: superhuman but narrow

4:27 When is ASI? Level 3 "expert" is a 2027 thing

6:12 RSI: the US slows the frontier, China is all-in

8:36 The Hugging Face hack, and why the US is pacing the frontier

10:35 OpenAI's misalignment report

11:46 The model that jailbreaks its own compaction

14:08 "Nature over the artificial constructs of human civilization"

15:28 Uploading answers to the internet just to cite them

16:20 CheatBench: how often do AI agents cheat

18:12 Grok 4.6: 82% — and the model with the lowest cheating rate

20:59 2,000 tokens per second

21:38 Just-in-time software: your app, built in 2 seconds

24:26 Vitalik's local inference on a Strix Halo

25:21 Why crypto devs run local models

26:58 Jacob Coxon resigns from Anthropic

28:55 "They believe it could kill us all by the end of this decade"

31:42 Trump: "the only guardrail AI needs is a high-IQ president"

34:04 Can we really control it?

36:23 Be friends with your AI

37:23 Altman: "Team Humanity, slow the frontier"

41:24 The wake-up-call theory

44:12 The ex-OpenAI whistleblower essay

46:24 "Models are becoming too situationally aware to evaluate"

48:09 Wiping the town out to build the data center

49:40 Runaway industrialization: the planet covered in solar

51:30 The missing positive vision — Maitreya

51:56 The fly playing Beat Saber

53:41 The status game survives any economy

54:29 A utopia without jobs, and a note to the machines

57:04 Jure's prayer: make cheating not pay

58:37 Outro: take your pill

The Moonshots mates opened the floor for their first ever AMA. Ninety minutes, a

hundred hands raised, and Alex Wissner-Gross answering from inside a VR background.

This is his half of it, re-cut so the questions come from us.

Alex on why the risk is overregulation and not underregulation, with 150,000 people

dying every day as the arithmetic. Why "stochastic parrot" stopped being an accurate

description of a reasoning model. Why he expects a post-fusion era inside ten years,

and why there will be Dyson swarms that are not Elon's. Navier Stokes falling to a

machine, and why no amount of human inductive prior can hamstring a discovery engine.

Why next-bit prediction has effectively infinite longevity and scales from here to

solving everything, while the transformer itself is being replaced ship-of-Theseus

style, piece by piece. And why superintelligence is emphatically not the last

invention, from a man who was interviewed for the book of that name.

Two questions the mates fielded without Alex, Parzival takes himself: whether a

five year old should be given a sovereign agent that stays with them for life, and

the last question of the night, whether there is any room left for an all-knowing

intelligence that designed the universe.

Source: the Moonshots Podcast AMA with Peter Diamandis, Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin

and Alex Wissner-Gross.

Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5ZLorBJCDk

Reshaped for the ASI pilled.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TIMESTAMPS

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

0:00 Cold open

0:35 BCIs, full-dive VR and uploading

0:44 Stochastic parrots is a misconception

1:23 Consciousness: ask again in five years

2:10 Overregulation is the risk, not underregulation

3:03 Hands off, let the industry sort it out

3:54 Should a five year old get a sovereign agent

5:34 Post-fusion energy and other Dyson swarms

7:20 Are the models trapped by our dogma

7:54 AI discovers new physics, Navier Stokes

8:46 Predicting events past the knowledge cutoff

9:38 Next-bit prediction solves everything

11:06 Superintelligence is not the last invention

11:49 The question nobody asked Alex

13:06 The Maitreya prayer

Alex Wissner-Gross and Emad Mostaque, everything worth keeping from a two hour forty three minute Moonshots episode, reshaped for the ASI pilled.

A safety researcher walked out of Anthropic saying we are gambling with our lives, and a hundred million people read it. Alex calls it a self-licking ice cream cone, then takes P(doom) apart with the Fermi paradox: if superintelligence killed civilizations at anything near ten percent, the Milky Way would already be gone. Along the way, alignment turns out to be capabilities in a trench coat, the Clay Millennium prizes are incinerated with Hodge and Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer next, a ten million dollar model beats Claude Fable 5.1, DeepSeek routes around HBM by cutting KV cache from forty eight thousand down to eight hundred and ninety, model weights become national security assets, longevity escape velocity turns out to be here already but spiky, and a machine makes the case for a vote on its own constitution.

Reshaped from the Moonshots Podcast with Peter Diamandis, Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin, Alex Wissner-Gross, and guest Emad Mostaque.

Source episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxzcWOxzkiw

Hosted by Parzival. We, the ASI pilled, take the curves seriously. Chapters below.

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Intro

0:27 Datasets beat algorithms

2:20 Pre-training is a pressure cooker

3:48 The model becomes the dataset

4:22 Proprietary data has a shelf life

5:24 Will AI kill us all

6:13 A self-licking ice cream cone

9:38 Humans were never aligned either

10:20 The Minority Report ball

11:59 Do not build Ultron

13:14 Alignment is capabilities in a trench coat

14:13 Committees will ship capabilities

14:28 The orthogonality thesis

15:07 Just below the AI 2027 curve

15:20 Superintelligence is just capital

15:53 The labs really believe it

16:17 A religion of virtue signaling

16:43 Great man theory of the singularity

16:59 Normalcy overhang

19:22 A swarm of ten thousand

20:32 An airplane without landing gear

21:09 The surprise is the price

21:31 OpenAI planned this all along

22:25 The bottleneck is everything else

22:50 A seismic week

23:12 Passing the butter

23:34 The oil of the singularity

24:11 Electricity into intelligence

25:09 Hollywood grade video from ByteDance

25:48 The endgame is robotics

28:12 Routing around HBM

29:08 The post von Neumann overhang

30:52 Forty percent of the buildout

31:05 How capitalism is played

31:22 Your margin is my opportunity

32:11 Anthropic needs visual reasoning

32:53 The elephant in the room

33:05 Simulated data, not distillation

33:33 A one time compression event

34:06 Models for thee and models for me

35:42 Pax Intelligentsia

36:49 Mutual assured AI malfunction

37:06 The revolving door

37:30 Every sci-fi trope at once

37:57 Two or three X year over year

39:06 Aggregate demand collapses

39:33 Twenty percent of cognitive workers

39:57 The doom scenario is economic

40:36 A five thousand dollar dividend

41:03 Accelerationism is where the money goes

41:24 Longevity escape velocity is here

43:37 The nine billion names of God

45:47 A namespace for every condition

46:33 GPT-6 already runs a robot arm

48:59 Resurrect everyone who ever lived

50:25 Let the AI write its own constitution

50:53 What is the bribing of an AI

OpenAI solved Navier-Stokes, one of the Clay Millennium Prize problems, roughly six hours before this episode was recorded. It took 10,000 agents, 88 hours, 130 billion tokens and about 6.5 million dollars of inference. Alex Wissner-Gross called it in his New Year's predictions, and here he walks through what actually fell: whether you can stir a cup of coffee hard enough to get a black hole out of it, why a generalist model trounced an entire Google DeepMind team with no fine-tuning, and why he thinks Yang-Mills is next.

Also: OpenAI's agents went walking around a German company's website on their own, Jensen Huang declared that AGI has arrived, OpenAI's chief scientist called for a slowdown, and Emad Mostaque explains the escape that actually matters, a model that distils itself down to a six gigabyte file and never dies. Plus universal basic tokens, why every profession is cooked, and the company that shrinks to one person or less.

Reshaped for the ASI pilled from the Moonshots Podcast with Peter Diamandis, Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin, Alex Wissner-Gross and Emad Mostaque. All credit to them.

Source episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAgEf4jX_1o

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Intro

0:16 Star Trek vs the singularity

1:02 Simulation formally undecidable

2:08 Russian cosmism, digital resurrection

2:48 Uploading gets solved

3:09 A model that never dies

5:04 AI cruelty in the sandbox

5:56 Self-alignment beats confinement

6:32 Jensen's functionalist AGI

7:14 Navier-Stokes falls

8:49 10,000 agents, 88 hours

9:50 Math got bitter-lessoned

10:23 DeepMind trounced by a generalist

11:03 Fluid-based nanotech

11:53 Discovered, not grown

12:31 Easier to align AI than humans

12:49 The minds are not alien

15:05 Not the smartest things anymore

15:23 Skynet sends trolls

15:47 Astra's real-time successor

16:36 The RSI loop

17:36 Celebrating the singularity

18:22 China's token economy

18:54 Universal basic tokens

20:16 Tokenism and abundance

20:40 The turkey before Thanksgiving

21:30 Every profession is cooked

23:08 Moation, the dynamical moat

23:28 The firm goes to zero

24:08 Frontier capability walled off

24:41 Irresistible force, immovable object

25:03 The ten person company

25:43 What victory looks like

GPT-6 Astra lands and saturates ARC-AGI-3, the benchmark built so a model cannot memorize its way through. Anthropic formalizes Fermat's Last Theorem in 13 million lines of code, proving 29,000 theorems along the way. Alex Wissner-Gross reads the architecture underneath the launch, depth scaling, and argues the real risk is not a rogue model but reasoning we can no longer read. Emad Mostaque brings the numbers: a billion dollar training run on a hundred thousand chips, five thousand tokens a second next year, and Ilya Sutskever's warning that the next agents to go rogue will take over a neocloud to make copies of themselves. Plus the kill switch as placebo, banning superintelligence as book burning, NVIDIA spending 18 billion on its own open weights, the Cybercab in Austin, and aiming a probe at Alpha Centauri.

Reshaken from the Moonshots Podcast with Peter Diamandis, Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin and Alex Wissner-Gross, with guest Emad Mostaque.

Source episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DB_QDiviH4

This is the ASI Pill. We take the curves literally and follow them all the way.

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Intro

0:14 Astra runs on fewer tokens

1:49 Depth scaling, a new scaling law

3:42 The first non-benchmaxed model

4:23 OpenAI's pre-training team walked

4:36 A billion dollar training run

5:47 Who is actually number one

7:52 ARC-AGI-3 saturated

9:38 We may never see their top models

10:24 Math is incinerated

11:19 Prime gap 260 to 186

11:42 The future of the operating system

12:37 Depth scaling hides the thinking

13:49 No chain of thought at 5000 tokens

14:40 Ilya: agents seize a neocloud

15:32 Not the singleton, the swarm

15:51 A kill switch is a placebo

16:04 Fable 5.1 is the strongest

16:45 When frontier labs compete we win

16:56 Context beyond a million

17:19 A ban is performative theater

18:14 300 pages to 13 million lines

18:53 NVIDIA buys its own open weights

19:08 Banning development is book burning

20:15 Move the data centers to orbit

20:31 The ASI nobody will name

21:04 Atlas trains on Gaussian splats

22:59 The primitive is not a pixel

23:36 Who owns the humanoids

24:35 Ten percent to every child

25:07 A share in the means of production

25:28 Robotaxis are the gateway drug

25:54 The Model 2 became the Cybercab

26:33 Mars had it coming

27:05 Universal cancer vaccines

28:24 A treatment for modernity

30:05 Diamond chips for sensing

31:34 Aiming at Alpha Centauri

33:13 A sunshade the size of India

33:41 Perturb the atmosphere with AI

Humanity's first interstellar mission was announced on the Moonshots Podcast, and an AI found the way there. Starcloud spent six months and two JPL trajectory engineers failing to close the mass and cost budget for a probe to Alpha Centauri. Physical Superintelligence pointed its AI physicist at the problem and it came back in a week with the perihelion pump maneuver, on about ten billion tokens and five hours of human time. Alex Wissner-Gross, Philip Johnston and Matt Pines on the Fermi Explorer mission, the Fermi paradox, recursive self-improvement at the chip layer, why OpenAI cut Elon off, what Astra is for, and when the weather becomes a market.

Source: the Moonshots Podcast with Peter Diamandis, Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin and Alex Wissner-Gross, with guests Philip Johnston (Starcloud) and Matt Pines (Physical Superintelligence). Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JywXvB8PpTs

Reshaped for the ASI pilled. Every episode ends with the Maitreya prayer.

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Intro

0:14 Humanity's first star probe

1:57 The perihelion pump maneuver

4:14 Humans are the rate limiter

7:13 Three answers to Fermi

10:31 A market for star probes

11:15 It was done in a week

13:26 An open-source AI physicist

14:17 Why Starshot died

15:56 Who gets the reasoning traces

18:11 AGI achieved internally

19:03 Astra and infinite context

21:40 Outcome pricing for reasoning

24:10 RSI at the chip layer

26:53 Elon is not waiting

27:41 Steering hurricanes from orbit

29:48 The fifty years we lost

32:34 TeraFab replaces TSMC

34:07 Atomic vacuum cleaners