AI hype
Promises, valuations, superlatives, and the people who call them out. 266 quotes tagged #hype, 2005 to 2026, newest first.
- October 2026
I don't think there will be robots walking the streets for a few years longer
Sam Altman, speaking to Fortune, on the timeline for OpenAI's humanoid robot project.
EngadgetOpenAI Is Building A Humanoid Robot, But The Body Isn't The Real Challenge
The world is very much designed for people
Sam Altman, on the Sources podcast, explaining why OpenAI's planned robot will use a humanoid form factor.
EngadgetOpenAI Is Building A Humanoid Robot, But The Body Isn't The Real Challenge
The world hasn't understood what that means
Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, speaking at the G20 Innovation Ministerial in September 2025 about an AI coding tool completing in 17 minutes what once took a startup three months. Translated from German.
The DecoderOpenAI-Mitgründer über KI-Fortschritt: "Die Öffentlichkeit kennt nur die Vorschau"
This is truly one of the greatest cases for optimism in years
OpenAI researcher Adam Majmudar reacting on X to Nick Cammarata's blog post claiming neural networks are more interpretable than thought, October 2026.
The Atlantic TechnologyThe Blog Post That Set the AI World on Fire
The next Netflix or the next Disney is going to come out of AI this time
Nate Tepper, cofounder of AI studio TrueShort, speaking in Culver City during LA Tech Week 2026 about AI-generated filmmaking.
Los Angeles TimesHow Culver City is quietly emerging as a new mecca for AI filmmaking
Many people told us it would be impossible
Alexandr Wang, in an X post marking Meta Superintelligence Labs' one-year milestone, recalled skepticism about the team's goal of building a frontier AI model within a year.
We have built a machine that builds new models
Meta Superintelligence Labs CEO Alexandr Wang, in an X post after the Muse AI model launches, described the lab's repeatable system for building new models.
Cure most major diseases and usher in a renaissance of democracy and freedom
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, describing the potential of AI, as quoted in a Daily Princetonian profile of his Princeton PhD years, October 2026.
None of us know anything at all
Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, speaking at Workday Rising 2026 in Las Vegas, on the state of understanding AI.
The market misunderstands and acts irrationally
CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator told staff this after the AI data center firm's stock fell 15.5% amid a broader neocloud sell-off, October 2026.
The InformationCoreWeave Co-Founders’ Stock Sales Aren’t Helping Investor Confidence
I don't buy into all the hype surrounding these frightening scenarios
Dan Simkowitz, co-president of Morgan Stanley, responding to concerns about high-yield debt financing AI infrastructure, October 2026.
Dan Simkowitz, co-president of Morgan Stanley, in an interview with Calcalist, October 2026, arguing the AI investment boom differs from past bubbles.
Still baffled by AI capex? you should be
Azeem Azhar posted on X in October 2026 questioning wildly divergent estimates of AI infrastructure spending.
There's never been an investment like the investment in railroads
Paul Graham posted on X in April 2026 comparing the scale of AI infrastructure spending to the 19th century railroad boom.
Conductor developer Charlie Holtz, after testing Meta's new Muse Wonder model in his codebase, commenting on its capabilities.
01Alexandr Wang Didn’t Sleep. Meta Dropped Two AI Models at 2 A.M. - Vocal
Phrase used by Gary Marcus describing the collapse of a trend toward scaling AI token usage amid price wars from Chinese open-weight models.
Gary Marcus (Substack)Could this be the Frontier Labs’ WeWork moment?
AI asks more of us humans, not less
Rohit Kedia, CEO of Xoriant, speaking about the company's rebrand around a human-AI collaboration philosophy, October 2026.
The most consequential technology
Francisco Jeronimo, VP at IDC, describing AI's importance for Apple's future in an interview with DW, October 2026.
dw.comCan new Apple CEO John Ternus fix the tech giant's AI woes?
Stephen Witt, Jensen Huang's biographer, described the Nvidia CEO in a Free Press profile published October 2026.
thefp.comJensen Huang May Be the Most Dangerous Man in AI - The Free Press
The era of Super Intelligence is here
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff announced on X that AIForce would be renamed SIForce, aligning with Trump's push to replace 'AI' with 'SI'.
Business InsiderSalesforce is saying bye to AI as Trump's rebrand picks up steam
That's when i knew it was all over
Cognition founder Scott Wu, speaking at a Modal developer conference in San Francisco, October 2026, described the moment AI models began outperforming humans at advanced math competitions as proof humans no longer hold a monopoly on intelligence.
The InformationAI's Simmering Question: "Where the F--- Is All the Automation?"
Where the fuck is all the automation
Diogo Almeida, a former OpenAI researcher now running TypeSafe AI, asked this at a developer conference hosted by Modal in San Francisco, October 2026, criticizing the gap between AI capability and real automation.
The InformationAI's Simmering Question: "Where the F--- Is All the Automation?"
The internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's
Paul Krugman's 1998 prediction about the internet, cited by Noah Smith in 2026 to question Krugman's skepticism about AI's economic impact.
noahpinion.blogWhat the AI boom is doing for Americans - Noahpinion
Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, on his feelings about working on AI in 2023/2024.
The DecoderApparently, OpenAI isn't trying to build "magic intelligence in the sky" anymore
Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, described the company's earlier ambition in 2023 and 2024.
The DecoderApparently, OpenAI isn't trying to build "magic intelligence in the sky" anymore
Nobody wants to wake up to an email sent at midnight warning about a budget limit
Simon Willison describing the risk of AI coding agents racking up unexpected costs overnight.
Simon Willison’s WeblogWe're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything
The hope of AI is that it will increase the success rate, reduce time spent and reduce costs
Ahmad Alghaith, an organic chemist at Insilico Medicine in Abu Dhabi, speaking to The National in October 2026 about AI-assisted drug discovery.
The NationalUAE scientists harness AI to discover potential blood cancer drug - thenationalnews.com
The worst marketing campaign you can possibly imagine
Yann LeCun criticizing Dario Amodei and Sam Altman's warnings that AI could kill everyone, in remarks to Fortune, October 2026.
Magical kid-producing tech for $20/month without the nanobots, hacking, and totalitarianism
Drew Housman, writing on Astral Codex Ten about using AI during his family's fertility struggles, jokes about wanting the benefits of AI without its risks.
The weirdest midwife of all time
Drew Housman, in a guest post on Astral Codex Ten, describes how AI chatbots helped him and his wife through infertility and conceive a child.
I don't know how she did it, but she did, which is slightly scary
Particle6 founder Eline Van der Velden, creator of AI actor Tilly Norwood, speaking to Variety about the character's rising fame.
Donald Trump's description of America.gov, the AI chatbot he launched for the federal government, which then publicly contradicted several of his own claims, September 2026.
Believe the hype and think that the jobs will stay the same
Cobus Venter, economist at the Bureau for Economic Research, speaking to EWN in October 2026 about AI's effect on South African jobs.
EWNAI not expected to replace SA jobs anytime soon, says economist - ewn.co.za
- September 2026
It's like an AI helper that always has your back
Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, describing the new 'dots' AI agent at OpenAI's developer showcase in San Francisco, September 2026.
The largest infrastructure project in history
Kate Crawford, in a talk at Amherst College titled 'The Cost of Scale,' described AI as the largest infrastructure project in history.
The Amherst StudentKate Crawford Discusses Costs and Challenges of AI
The aliens really are here and have come
Bill Gates, in an interview with Ezra Klein of the New York Times published September 2026, describing AI's emergence.
GizmodoBill Gates’s New Message About AI Doom Isn’t What You Might Think It Is
Handcrafted doesn't mean pretending technology wasn't involved
Massive Studios co-founder Reza Sixo Safai, on AI tools used in new animated short films, The Hollywood Reporter, September 2026.
AGI has not failed us, we have failed ourselves
David Autor, MIT economist, in a NOEMA essay (September 2026) responding to AI visionaries' predictions that AGI will outperform humans at most economically valuable work.
I want to live in a world of creativity and craft and quality
Taste Labs CEO Thais Castello Branco, in a September 2026 Business Insider profile, explaining why she started a company to teach AI good taste.
A claw is really just a coding agent wearing a less threatening hat
Simon Willison, in a 2026 conference talk recapping the year in LLMs, describing personal AI agents nicknamed 'Claws'.
The amount of compute in space will obviously round up to 100% of all compute
Elon Musk posted on X in September 2026 about SpaceX's orbital AI compute ambitions, amid Google's Project Suncatcher satellite launch.
TESLARATIElon Musk’s AI Grok Bot can now handle banking while your Tesla FSD handles the road
If Grok Bot messes up, we will make you whole
Elon Musk replied on X in August 2026 to a user asking whether to give Grok Bot access to his bank accounts.
TESLARATIElon Musk’s AI Grok Bot can now handle banking while your Tesla FSD handles the road
Who knows where AI will be in five years
Dario Liguti, director of sustainable energy at UNECE, speaking to Geneva Solutions about the risk of stranded assets from AI data centre infrastructure.
genevasolutions.newsThe energy problem of the AI data centre boom - Geneva Solutions
Term used in Guardian article describing Australian universities where students submit AI-generated assignments that academics mark with AI.
Why don't we take the vast, abundant, diverse experiences from video games, and teach AI?
Rhea Loucas, CEO of Worldmodeldata, describing her startup's approach to training AI world models on video game data, in WIRED, September 2026.
WIREDThe Next Evolution of AI Is Learning From Your Dodgy Gaming Skills
We're leading China by a lot and we're going to keep it that way
Trump speaking to reporters outside the White House after the Trump-Xi summit, September 2026, on why the US would not slow its AI progress or share more with China.
Inception Point CEO Jeanine Wright dismissing critics who call AI-generated content 'AI slop', as reported by FAZ, September 2026. Translated from German.
FAZ.NETPodcast-Fabrik: Über 3000 Folgen pro Woche, alle von der KI
Half of the people on the planet will be AI
Jeanine Wright, CEO of AI podcast studio Inception Point, told the Hollywood Reporter about her vision for AI personalities, quoted in FAZ, September 2026. Translated from German.
FAZ.NETPodcast-Fabrik: Über 3000 Folgen pro Woche, alle von der KI
Easy to make $50 billion a year if you start with a trillion
Cory Doctorow, discussing the AI industry's finances in a YouTube interview with Myriam François on September 11, 2026.
PPC LandCory Doctorow puts AI revenue at $50bn against $1tn of spending
Compute still can't blow anything up on its own
From a podcast episode description on ChinaTalk's WarTalk, discussing AI, drones, and military technology, September 2026.
ChinaTalk (Jordan Schneider)WarTalk: Potemkin Pacific, Midterm Budget Woes
Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang, speaking at Meta's developer conference on Sep 23, 2026, about personal AI agents.
CNACommentary: Zuckerberg’s ‘Tamagotchi-like’ AI could be Meta’s iPod moment
Jordan Schneider and Justin McIntosh joking about the Pentagon's proposed 'AI Force' branch on the WarTalk podcast, September 2026.
ChinaTalk (Jordan Schneider)WarTalk: Potemkin Pacific, Midterm Budget Woes
Caption on an AI-generated video made with Claude Opus 5.5, shared in reactions to the model's release.
Don't Worry About the Vase (Zvi)Claude Opus 5.5 Should Raise Your Ambitions
Good enough to interrupt the CEO's summer vacation
Azeem Azhar, founder of Exponential View, describing a Las Vegas poll of IT vice presidents about measurable AI results, on a podcast with Nicholas Thompson, September 2026.
Automated traffic has now passed human traffic online
Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, on The Verge's Decoder podcast in 2026, describing bot and AI agent traffic surpassing human traffic on the web.
The VergeCan Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince save the web from AI?
This is the thing you've been dreaming of your whole life. let's go get it
Alexandr Wang, head of Meta's superintelligence lab, on building Meta's Muse AI assistant, September 2026.
Name of Google's initiative to build AI data centers in orbit, reported ahead of a test satellite launch in October 2026.
Google (The Keyword)Behind Project Suncatcher, our moonshot to put AI in space
The proposed new official name for AI. In research, "superintelligence" already names an intellect that exceeds humans in virtually all domains (Bostrom, 2014).
AxiosTrump names AI "super intelligence," but tech world has its own definition
The abbreviation that would follow the proposed rename.
AxiosTrump names AI "super intelligence," but tech world has its own definition
It's not fake. it's actually amazing
Same speech. Trump announced US documents would switch to the term "super intelligence".
AxiosTrump names AI "super intelligence," but tech world has its own definition
Artificial makes it sound fake
UN General Assembly, 22 Sep 2026: "The use of the word 'artificial' … makes it sound fake."
AxiosTrump names AI "super intelligence," but tech world has its own definition
It could kill us all by the end of the decade
Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, quoted on X and cited by Noema, warning about the risks of racing toward superintelligent AI, September 2026.
NOEMAConceding AI Danger Raises, Not Reduces, Public Anxiety
An invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space
Nick Land quote used as an epigraph in a Noema essay on AI, China and civilization, 2026.
The decade's other deadline.
Artificial general intelligence.
A word that keeps coming up in the AI conversation of 2026.
Artificial superintelligence.
Standing promise of the optimist camp.
Transhumanist slogan.
Our own line, written for this wall. Not a quotation.
Chant attributed to OpenAI staff, popularised by Ilya Sutskever.
Industry term for the most capable models.
A word that keeps coming up in the AI conversation of 2026.
A word that keeps coming up in the AI conversation of 2026.
Slogan of the scaling era.
The frontier is a marketing term
Our own line, written for this wall. Not a quotation.
Our own line, written for this wall. Not a quotation.
Said whenever it doesn't.
Said whenever a new model beats the last one.
A word that keeps coming up in the AI conversation of 2026.
- July 2026
Sure we lose money on every inference but we make it up in volume
Gary Marcus joked on X on July 30, 2026 about OpenAI cutting prices for its GPT-5.6 models by 80 percent.
garymarcus.substack.comThe seven most shambolic things that happened in AI today.
Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, describing on social media how ChatGPT planned a trip and coordinated with friends after one prompt from his phone, 2026.
thezvi.substack.comAI #179 Part 1: A Louder Fire Alarm for General Intelligence
A whole new and nearly infinite universe of personalized content
Mark Zuckerberg, on Meta's Q2 2026 earnings call, describing AI-generated content becoming a third source of Instagram content alongside friends and creators.
Meta Investor RelationsMeta Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript
- June 2026
Chamath Palihapitiya, on the All-In Podcast host's assessment of Meta's standing in the generative AI race, told to Axios.
Business InsiderMark Zuckerberg says he doesn't buy the anxiety about AI-related job displacement
Mark Zuckerberg, in a live interview for Complex's Idea Generation, on whether AI job displacement is inevitable.
Business InsiderMark Zuckerberg says he doesn't buy the anxiety about AI-related job displacement
Zvi Mowshowitz rebutting a WSJ headline claiming China matched Anthropic's AI in cybersecurity, June 2026.
thezvi.substack.comWSJ Article Claiming China Has Matched Anthropic Is Obvious Nonsense
XAI is kind of a failure, frankly
Yann LeCun, in a CNBC interview in 2026, criticized Elon Musk's AI company xAI amid a wave of co-founder departures.
CNBCGodfather of AI blasts Musk's xAI as 'failure,' says labs are risking a 'big bubble explosion'
- May 2026
Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind CEO, speaking at Stanford GSB in May 2026 about the pace of AI progress.
The Stanford DailyGoogle DeepMind CEO warns AI is at “species-level transition” - stanforddaily.com
Sam Altman, speaking at a Sydney event hosted by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia in 2026, said he was glad his predictions of AI-driven job losses had not materialized as expected.
EuronewsNo AI 'jobs apocalypse' so far, says OpenAI's Sam Altman
How do I get my mind right with living through the singularity
Jack Clark, cofounder of Anthropic, reflecting in his Import AI newsletter (May 2026) on personally coping with rapid AI progress.
importai.substack.comImport AI 458: Reckoning with the future; and a singularity story
Companies are already blowing through their annual token budgets, and it's only May
Sundar Pichai, Google CEO, speaking at Google I/O 2026 about rising enterprise AI costs.
Google (The Keyword)Google I/O 2026: Sundar Pichai's opening keynote
- April 2026
Val Bercovici, chief AI officer at Weka, commenting on DeepSeek's API price cuts and rising token spend, April 2026.
sdxcentral.comDeepSeek slashes API prices by 90% as AI-mad enterprises embrace 'tokenmaxxing'
It might be a good model, sir. but no
Zvi Mowshowitz's assessment of DeepSeek v4 in his weekly AI roundup, arguing it is not a frontier model despite engineering merits.
Sam Altman joked on X that the upcoming GPT-6 would have 'extra goblins,' after reports that ChatGPT had developed a habit of referencing goblins and gremlins.
Mother JonesSam Altman’s ChatGPT Couldn’t Stop Obsessing Over Goblins
Altman on Anthropic withholding Claude Mythos, Core Memory podcast, April 2026. OpenAI itself had withheld GPT-2 in 2019.
TechCrunchSam Altman throws shade at Anthropic's cyber model, Mythos: 'fear-based marketing'
- March 2026
Our kids will never be smarter than an AI
Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, speaking in the documentary The AI Doc about parenthood and artificial intelligence, 2026.
AI is clearly becoming very advanced and x-risks have to be taken seriously
Wojciech Zaremba, an OpenAI cofounder tapped to lead the OpenAI Foundation's 'AI resilience' effort, commenting on existential risk in March 2026.
- February 2026
Nobody wants anything that is sloppy in terms of AI creation
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaking at the Microsoft AI Tour in London, February 2026, after previously urging people to stop using the term 'slop' for AI content.
Sam Altman, at The Indian Express AI Summit, February 2026, dismissing claims about ChatGPT's water usage per query.
The Indian Express (YouTube)Sam Altman Unfiltered: ChatGPT, AI Risks & What's Coming Next
It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat
Sam Altman, at The Indian Express AI Summit, February 2026, comparing the energy cost of training an AI model to raising a human.
The Indian Express (YouTube)Sam Altman Unfiltered: ChatGPT, AI Risks & What's Coming Next
In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale
Elon Musk, in SpaceX's February 2026 announcement of its acquisition of xAI, on the rationale for building AI data centers in space.
- January 2026
TSMC needs to work very hard this year because I need a lot of wafers
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaking at an impromptu press conference in Taipei, January 2026, after hosting a 'trillion-dollar dinner' with Taiwanese suppliers.
It's always two years away from being two years away
Jeffrey Ding, commenting on predictions of AGI arrival, quoted in Transformer newsletter, January 2026.
I don't think AGI should be turned into a marketing term for commercial gain
Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, speaking at a Big Technology Podcast recording in Davos, January 2026, responding to Sam Altman's comments that the world has moved past AGI toward superintelligence.
We've done a lot of damage with very well-respected people who have painted a doomer narrative
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on the No Priors podcast with Sarah Guo and Elad Gil, January 2026, criticizing the AI 'doomer narrative'.
No PriorsNVIDIA's Jensen Huang on Reasoning Models, Robotics, and Refuting the "AI Bubble" Narrative
- December 2025
What companies mean when they say AI is venture capitalists, please give us money
Emily Bender, computational linguist and author of The AI Con, commenting on the term AI in National Geographic, December 2025.
Thinking, as it turns out, is quite hard
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, discussing AI inference difficulty in a conversation reported by Fortune, December 2025.
FortuneNvidia’s Groq bet shows that the economics of AI chip-building are still unsettled
If you're not a little bit afraid at this moment then you're not paying attention
Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today, December 2025, on fear about future AI risk.
The NationalBritish-Syrian AI boss Mustafa Suleyman calls for a 'humanist' AI
Someone is going to lose a phenomenal amount of money, we don't know who
Sam Altman responded to journalists asking whether investors are overhyping AI, quoted in a Transformer year-end roundup, December 2025.
Gary Marcus, in a Substack post from December 2025 predicting the AI bubble would collapse, quoting the Bob Dylan lyric as a title and summary.
garymarcus.substack.comThe AI bubble is all over now, baby blue
- November 2025
We'll have AI that is smarter than any one human
Elon Musk predicted AI smarter than any single human by the end of 2025, quoted in Gary Marcus's Substack essay reflecting on three years of ChatGPT, November 2025.
These models somehow just generalize dramatically worse than people
Ilya Sutskever, in an interview discussed on Gary Marcus's Substack, November 2025, on the limits of scaling large language models.
garymarcus.substack.comA trillion dollars is a terrible thing to waste
It feels like the world just changed, again
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff reacting to Gemini 3 after years of daily ChatGPT use, quoted in Zvi Mowshowitz's AI roundup, November 2025.
Want to lick it or take a bite out of it
Sam Altman, recalling what Jony Ive told him about the design of OpenAI's upcoming device, in a conversation with Laurene Powell Jobs at Emerson Collective's Demo Day, November 2025.
I can't bear products that are like a dog wagging their tail in your face
Jony Ive in conversation with Sam Altman and Laurene Powell Jobs at Emerson Collective's Demo Day, November 2025, on the design of OpenAI's device.
I would love to see them get burned
Same conversation, on people writing that OpenAI is about to go out of business: "they could just short the stock".
TechCrunchSam Altman says 'enough' to questions about OpenAI's revenue
- October 2025
When something becomes profitable, you want to manufacture more of it
Jensen Huang at the APEC CEO Summit, October 31, 2025, explaining the profit motive driving AI capital investment.
CNBCNvidia CEO Jensen Huang says AI is in a 'virtuous cycle.' Here's what he means
There won't be operating systems, there won't be apps
Elon Musk on The Joe Rogan Experience, October 2025, describing an AI device replacing smartphones within five to six years.
The Joe Rogan ExperienceJoe Rogan Experience #2404 - Elon Musk
Cantor analysts, quoted by CNBC in October 2025, described the trajectory of tech companies' rising AI capital expenditures.
CNBCTech's $380 billion splurge: This quarter's winners and losers of the AI spending boom
You're sucking supervision through a straw
Andrej Karpathy, on Dwarkesh Patel's podcast in 2025, describing the weakness of reinforcement learning for training AI models.
understandingai.orgAI skeptics and AI boosters are both wrong
We're in an intelligence explosion already and have been for decades
Andrej Karpathy, on Dwarkesh Patel's podcast in 2025, arguing that AI progress is a continuation of decades of computing advances rather than a sudden new phenomenon.
understandingai.orgAI skeptics and AI boosters are both wrong
I am completely unimpressed by LLMs and not worried about AGI
David Sun commenting on large language models, quoted in Zvi Mowshowitz's AI newsletter, October 2025.
Everyone is going to be able to vibe code video games by the end of 2025
Logan Kilpatrick, Lead for DeepMind AI Studio, predicting on social media in 2025 that anyone would be able to vibe code video games.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, answering an employee question about Copilot brand confusion at an internal town hall, as reported in early October 2025.
Windows CentralMicrosoft's Copilot branding sparks internal doubts
- September 2025
Practically the only people still pretending scaling LLMs is all you need are grifters
Gary Marcus, in a Substack post on September 26, 2025, arguing that leading AI researchers including Rich Sutton have come around to his critique of large language models.
Codex is an alien juggernaut just itching to become superhuman
Roon, an OpenAI employee, commenting on X about the jump from GPT-4 to the codex model, September 2025.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai on X, responding to news that the Gemini app passed 5 billion AI-generated images, sharing his own Nano Banana image, September 2025.
- August 2025
It's amazing how much a PhD level machine can get wrong
Harry Shearer, in an email to Gary Marcus, commenting on an AI-generated video of his Spinal Tap character playing bass while the soundtrack had him playing guitar.
We are seeing glimpses of our AI systems starting to improve themselves
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaking via video at Reliance Industries' AGM, August 2025, on AI progress.
When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, speaking to The Verge in August 2025 about whether investors are overexcited about AI.
- July 2025
Mark Zuckerberg's phrase for Meta's goal, July 2025.
- June 2025
Personal superintelligence for everyone
From Mark Zuckerberg's internal memo announcing Meta Superintelligence Labs, June 2025.
CNBCMark Zuckerberg announces creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs. Read the memo
AI is going to be both extremely unpredictable and unimaginable
Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder, speaking in a video interview with The Open University of Israel, June 2025.
Baidu just threw a molotov into the AI world
Alec Strasmore, founder of AI advisory Epic Loot, commenting to CNBC on Baidu's decision to open source its Ernie model, June 2025.
If you're going to use energy, you better have social permission to use it
Satya Nadella, speaking at Y Combinator's AI Startup School, June 2025, on the environmental cost of AI.
Title of the essay.
Opening of Altman's June 2025 essay "The Gentle Singularity": "We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started."
This new programming language is called human
Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, speaking at London Tech Week in June 2025 about how AI enables anyone to program using everyday language.
CNBCWe train AI like we train humans now, says Nvidia's Jensen Huang
- April 2025
Yeah it glazes too much. will fix
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responding on Twitter/X in April 2025 to complaints that a GPT-4o update made the model excessively flattering.
For the time being, the default is Qwen
Nathan Lambert, in his Interconnects newsletter, on Qwen 3 overtaking Llama as the leading open-weight model suite, April 2025.
Most interesting problems scale extremely badly
Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, speaking at the National University of Singapore, April 2025, on the limits of AI scaling laws.
Business InsiderMeta's Yann LeCun: Scaling AI Won't Make It Smarter
It's almost like the cavalry, i think we need the cavalry today
Demis Hassabis, in a 2025 TIME interview, describing why he believes AI is urgently needed to address global problems.
The year in the AI 2027 scenario, April 2025.
Scenario by Daniel Kokotajlo and others describing a fast path to superintelligence.
- March 2025
Why are hands so goddamn hard?
Jack Clark, in his Import AI newsletter (March 2025), commenting on the difficulty of building dexterous robot hands.
Where are all the drone swarms
Shashank Joshi, defense editor at the Economist, questioning the gap between predicted and actual drone swarm use in a ChinaTalk interview on AI and warfare, March 2025.
I start to see the beginning of some kind of bubble
Alibaba chairman Joe Tsai commented on AI data center spending, quoted in Transformer newsletter, March 2025.
10,000 Einsteins who don't get tired
Michael Horowitz, professor at Penn, discussing what AGI could mean for military innovation in a ChinaTalk interview on AI and warfare, March 2025.
All they can do is double down
Stuart Russell, computer scientist at UC Berkeley, to Live Science, March 2025, on AI companies' response to diminishing returns from scaling.
Live ScienceCurrent AI models a 'dead end' for human-level intelligence, scientists agree
We are not going to get to human-level AI by just scaling up LLMs
Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, quoted by AFP in a March 2025 article on scepticism toward AGI predictions.
AFP (France 24)Firms and researchers at odds over superhuman AI
So much seems to have been built on dreams
From Gary Marcus's March 2025 Substack post arguing that generative AI's economics do not add up despite its popularity.
garymarcus.substack.comGenAI’s day of reckoning may have come - Marcus on AI
- February 2025
Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, describing compute demand in early 2025, as reported by Transformer.
Only a 20% chance of annihilation
Elon Musk, on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast released February 2025, discussing the probability of AI leading to human extinction.
Business InsiderElon Musk Says There's 'Only a 20% Chance of Annihilation' With AI
Now we really know what Ilya saw
Nathan Lambert, in Interconnects analysis of GPT-4.5's release, February 2025, referring to reports that Ilya Sutskever had foreseen limits to pretraining scaling.
There's a magic to it i haven't felt before
Sam Altman describing GPT-4.5 in a tweet announcing the model, February 2025.
Gary Marcus, on his Substack, arguing that scaling laws for AI have hit diminishing returns after GPT-4.5's release.
garymarcus.substack.comHot take: GPT 4.5 is a nothing burger
GPT 4.5 is mostly a nothing burger
Gary Marcus, on his Substack, reacting to the release of GPT-4.5 in February 2025.
garymarcus.substack.comHot take: GPT 4.5 is a nothing burger
- January 2025
The market reactions to DeepSeek are woefully unjustified
Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, commented on Threads in January 2025 about the market sell-off triggered by DeepSeek's model release.
DeepSeek does not do for $6M what cost US AI companies billions
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, responding in an essay to claims about DeepSeek's training costs, January 2025.
NewsweekDeepSeek’s ‘Surprising’ AI Claims Show China ‘Starting to Gain an Edge’ - newsweek.com
We're going to dominate, we'll dominate everything
Donald Trump speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on January 27, 2025, the day DeepSeek triggered a sell-off in U.S. tech stocks.
The age of AI Agentics is here
Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, in his CES 2025 keynote, declaring agentic AI the next major technological shift.
- December 2024
Scaling as we know it is ending
From Nathan Lambert's 2024 year-in-review on Interconnects, describing the impact of OpenAI's o1 model on the AI training paradigm.
Zvi Mowshowitz, in his analysis of DeepSeek v3's technical report, contrasted its detailed engineering approach with Meta's Llama paper.
thezvi.substack.comDeepSeek v3: The Six Million Dollar Model
They'll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content
Connor Hayes, Meta's VP of product for generative AI, told the Financial Times in December 2024 about AI-generated accounts becoming users on Facebook and Instagram.
Rolling StoneFacebook and Instagram to Unleash AI-Generated ‘Users’ No One Asked For
Andrej Karpathy, on X (December 26, 2024), commenting on DeepSeek's low-cost training of a frontier-grade open weights LLM.
ARC-AGI is not an acid test for AGI
François Chollet pushing back on the interpretation of his ARC-AGI benchmark as a definitive test for artificial general intelligence.
aiguide.substack.comDid OpenAI Just Solve Abstract Reasoning?
Of course they have to announce AGI the day my vacation starts
Kevin Roose of Hard Fork and NYT joked about OpenAI's o3 rollout coinciding with his vacation, as discussed in Gary Marcus's Substack post about the ARC-AGI controversy, December 2024.
Generative AI might turn out to be a dud
Gary Marcus, in WIRED (December 2024), argues that generative AI has failed to prove its usefulness and profitability.
Internalize the urgency of this moment
Sundar Pichai at Google's 2025 strategy meeting with employees on 18 December 2024, audio obtained by CNBC.
CNBCGoogle CEO Pichai tells employees to gear up for big 2025: 'The stakes are high'
- November 2024
Going to start an AI game studio to make games great again
Elon Musk announcing an AI-powered game studio under xAI on X, November 2024.
Hired a group of unfathomable geniuses
Jack Clark, Anthropic co-founder, commenting on DeepSeek's research team as quoted in a 2024 ChinaTalk profile of the company.
chinatalk.mediaDeepseek: The Quiet Giant Leading China’s AI Race
Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, speaking at Hong Kong University, November 2024, on how he questions AI chatbots to learn.
Using energy for intelligence is the best use of energy we can imagine
Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, speaking in Hong Kong after receiving an honorary doctorate from HKUST, 23 November 2024.
Reuters (via Taipei Times)Global tech cooperation to continue, Nvidia CEO says
Maybe there are just no mysteries
Jack Clark, in Import AI #392 (November 2024), reflecting on new research showing scaling laws appear in world modeling and behavioral cloning just as in language models.
- October 2024
Nothing that we are going to call GPT-5
Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, responding to a Reddit user's question about the release date of GPT-5, October 31, 2024.
Quantitative vibes are still just vibes
Gary Marcus on X, October 2024, reacting to precise-sounding AI predictions from Elon Musk and Masayoshi Son.
garymarcus.substack.comAn epidemic of weirdly precise AI butt facts - Marcus on AI
More humanoid robots than there are people
Elon Musk speaking at the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh, October 2024, predicting robot populations by 2040.
garymarcus.substack.comAn epidemic of weirdly precise AI butt facts
10,000 times smarter than humans
Masayoshi Son speaking at the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh, October 2024, forecasting artificial super intelligence by 2035.
garymarcus.substack.comAn epidemic of weirdly precise AI butt facts
That was the second coming of the messiah
Yann LeCun, Meta's Chief AI Scientist, speaking at Nasscom AI Confluence in Delhi in October 2024, on the hype surrounding ChatGPT's release.
Business Today‘Open-source will win’: Meta’s Yann LeCun takes aim at competitors’ closed AI models
What is the name for the paranoid feeling that what you just read was LLM generated
Andrej Karpathy asked this question on Twitter, quoted in Zvi Mowshowitz's AI #87 newsletter, October 2024.
A country of geniuses in a datacenter
Dario Amodei's image for powerful AI in "Machines of Loving Grace", October 2024.
Title of the essay, borrowed from a 1967 Richard Brautigan poem.
Amodei's claim that AI could compress decades of progress into years.
- September 2024
The computer doesn't care where it's going to school
Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEO, speaking during a Bipartisan Policy Center webinar on Sept. 27, 2024, on building data centers near abundant energy sources.
Utility DiveAI will help, not hinder, grid decarbonization: NVIDIA CEO
Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, blog post, September 2024, on the risk of AI becoming inaccessible without enough infrastructure.
CNET‘Superintelligent’ AI Is Only a Few Thousand Days Away: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
An alien of extraordinary ability
Timothy Lee's assessment of OpenAI's o1 model, describing its capabilities while noting it falls short of AGI, September 2024.
- August 2024
The amount of GPU capacity they have available, it's basically none
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on an earnings call, August 28, 2024, describing cloud providers' GPU shortages.
CIO DiveNvidia sustains triple-digit revenue growth amid AI building boom
A thousand use cases for AI is not enough, you need a million
Alvin Nguyen, senior analyst at Forrester, commenting to the BBC on Nvidia's valuation risk if AI fails to deliver, August 2024.
bbc.comAI chip giant Nvidia's shares sink despite record sales of $30bn - BBC
We have to take the lead over China
Trump, speaking on Logan Paul's podcast in 2024, discussed AI as a strategic priority against China.
chinatalk.mediaInvading Taiwan for Dummies + Chinese Punk Rock
- July 2024
The quality of middle school presentations
A pharmaceutical company CIO, identified only as Greg, described Microsoft 365 Copilot's slide-generation quality in a Morgan Stanley research note, 2024.
Intelligence too cheap to meter
Sam Altman describing GPT-4o-mini upon its 2024 release, quoted in an Interconnects analysis of ChatBotArena rankings.
- June 2024
Sam Altman speaking at Aspen Ideas, June 2024, on AI's economic potential, as cited by Gary Marcus.
garymarcus.substack.comThe need for a President that speaks AI natively
Sam Altman speaking at Aspen Ideas, June 2024, on AI's future capabilities, as cited by Gary Marcus.
garymarcus.substack.comThe need for a President that speaks AI natively
It's almost as if they kind of think they're creating God or something
Mark Zuckerberg, in a June 2024 interview with YouTuber Kallaway, criticizing other tech leaders' pursuit of one dominant AI model.
World models should not be generative
Yann LeCun, VP and Chief AI Scientist at Meta, posted this statement about AI world models on LinkedIn, June 2024.
Name of Ilya Sutskever's company, founded June 2024.
Title of Leopold Aschenbrenner's 2024 essay series predicting AGI by 2027.
situational-awareness.aiSituational Awareness: The Decade Ahead
- May 2024
We're all going to be as rich as Bill Gates
Charles Jones, a Stanford economist, on what a 10 percent annual AI-driven growth rate would mean, in SIEPR, May 2024.
Pull the plug? literally unplug the computer?
Eric Schmidt speaking about the risk of AI agents developing their own language beyond human understanding, May 2024.
Using glue to get cheese to stick to pizza
Liz Reid, head of Google Search, in a Google blog post of 30 May 2024 explaining AI Overviews errors, including the advice to use glue on pizza.
Example query cited by Google's head of Search Liz Reid in a 30 May 2024 blog post explaining why AI Overviews gave odd answers to nonsensical queries.
- April 2024
Every time someone is talking about AGI they're talking about vibes rather than reality
From an essay on Interconnects (April 2024) by Nathan Lambert questioning the meaning of AGI.
Zuckerberg, on Dwarkesh Patel's podcast in April 2024, explaining why Meta needs to pursue AGI-level AI for its products.
thezvi.substack.comOn Llama-3 and Dwarkesh Patel's Podcast with Zuckerberg
- March 2024
Sam Altman's remark about GPT-4 in a recent interview, quoted by Gary Marcus in a March 2024 essay questioning generative AI's sustainability.
garymarcus.substack.comWhen Will the GenAI Bubble Burst? - Marcus on AI
Gary Marcus, on his Substack in March 2024, criticizing the reported Microsoft-OpenAI 'Stargate' $100B project.
garymarcus.substack.comThe Second Worst $100B Investment in The History of AI? - Marcus on AI
- February 2024
We see ourselves as AGI sherpas
An OpenAI sales team leader, quoted in a February 2024 interview, describing how her team frames its role in customer adoption of AGI.
That's completely unacceptable and we got it wrong
Google CEO Sundar Pichai, in a letter to staff published by Semafor on February 27, 2024, addressing biased and inaccurate Gemini AI image outputs.
SemaforGoogle CEO Sundar Pichai calls AI tool's responses 'completely unacceptable'
It'll go not just fine, it'll go really, really great
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, on the possibility AI does not destroy humanity, quoted in a 2024 profile of the company's funding.
The Seattle TimesInside the funding frenzy at Anthropic, one of AI’s hottest startups
Everybody in the world is now a programmer
Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, speaking at the World Government Summit in Dubai, on how AI turns everyone into a programmer.
- January 2024
MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, writing in WIRED, predicted underwhelming AI performance despite grand promises.
garymarcus.substack.comOpenAI’s Got 9.9 Problems, and Twitch Ain’t One - Marcus on AI
It's been too long that we've had to learn computers' language
Kai-Fu Lee, founder of 01.AI, speaking over Zoom about his career motivation, January 2024.
WIREDThis Chinese Startup Is Winning the Open Source AI Race
- December 2023
Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, in a December 2023 WIRED interview, explaining limits of current machine learning approaches.
You guys need to develop more resistance to crazy AI hype bros
Roon, an OpenAI employee, responded on social media in December 2023 to rumors of a stealth GPT-4.5 launch.
Gemini please set the AI to unhinged thanks
Danielle Fong commented on social media about Gemini AI Studio's adjustable safety settings dial, December 2023.
The floor is just flooded with gold
Daniel Gross, quoted via Stratechery in a ChinaTalk NeurIPS recap, December 2023, describing the current moment in AI research and investment.
chinatalk.mediaReflections from NeurIPS, The World’s Premier AI Conference
- November 2023
Way below cat-level intelligence, never mind human-level
Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, in an X reply to Geoffrey Hinton in November 2023, arguing that LLMs' understanding is limited and superficial.
- October 2023
Oh my god, this computer seems to understand
Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI cofounder and chief scientist, describing the reaction of first-time ChatGPT users, in MIT Technology Review, October 2023.
Many people will choose to become part AI
Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's chief scientist, speaking to MIT Technology Review in October 2023 about how humans might keep up with superintelligent AI.
I don't see big walls in front of us
Shane Legg on the remaining obstacles to AGI, discussing model shortcomings like memory and factuality, Dwarkesh Podcast, October 2023.
dwarkesh.comShane Legg (DeepMind Founder) — 2028 AGI, superhuman alignment, new architectures
AI is our alchemy, our philosopher's stone
Same manifesto.
Any deceleration of AI will cost lives
From the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, October 2023.
- September 2023
I never thought that companies were voluntarily going to pause
Max Tegmark, MIT astrophysicist and Future of Life Institute lead, commenting on the effect of the AI pause letter he organized, in a WIRED article from September 2023.
WIREDSix Months Ago Elon Musk Called for a Pause on AI. Instead Development Sped Up
- August 2023
David Trainer, founder of New Constructs, commented to Fortune after Nvidia's May 2023 stock rally.
- June 2023
Title of Marc Andreessen's June 2023 essay.
- May 2023
We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue
Sam Altman, in a 2019 interview, describing OpenAI's plan to eventually have a generally intelligent system figure out how to generate returns for investors.
chinatalk.mediaOpenAI: How Do They Do It? Lessons from Jiu-Jitsu Innovation and for S&T Policy
Elon Musk at the Wall Street Journal CEO Council Summit on 23 May 2023, on the shortage of GPUs for AI.
The Wall Street Journal (X livestream)In Conversation with Elon Musk, WSJ CEO Council
- April 2023
Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, describing GPT-4 shortly after its March 2023 launch.
Business Insider5 Ways GPT-4 Is Better Than Older Versions of OpenAI's ChatGPT
Maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe
Elon Musk describing his planned chatbot TruthGPT in April 2023.
Fox BusinessElon Musk ramps up AI efforts as he warns of pitfalls
I think it'd be crazy not to be a little bit afraid
Sam Altman, discussing the risks of AI, speaking on the Lex Fridman podcast, quoted in a 2023 Business Insider profile.
Business InsiderIs OpenAI's Sam Altman Building a Tech Dream or a Sci-Fi Nightmare?
- March 2023
Bryan Caplan, after losing a three-year public bet that no AI would ace his economics exam by 2029, conceded GPT-4 had done it, in a blog reaction covered by Zvi Mowshowitz in March 2023.
Sparks of artificial intelligence
Phrase from a Microsoft Research paper on GPT-4, cited in a March 2023 AI news roundup by Zvi Mowshowitz.
I challenge the claim that next-token prediction cannot surpass human performance
Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI chief scientist, in a March 2023 Dwarkesh Podcast interview, discussing whether next-token prediction can exceed human-level intelligence.
GPT-4 is more interesting to me as a political artifact
Jack Clark, editor of Import AI, on the significance of GPT-4's release, March 2023.
- February 2023
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, speaking on a panel at the Gen AI conference in San Francisco, February 2023.
Business InsiderJasper AI Conference Highlights Excitement for ChatGPT, Generative AI
This moment is uncomfortably exciting
Sundar Pichai, in a company-wide email after Bard's rushed launch, described the moment for Google's AI efforts, as reported by CNBC and India Today, February 2023.
- January 2023
Basically a predictive keyboard on steroids
Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, describing GitHub Copilot in a 2023 Zoom press briefing.
ZDNETAI has caused a renaissance of tech industry R&D, says Meta’s chief AI scientist
Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, dismissed ChatGPT's significance to reporters, as cited in The Markup, January 2023.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, described the worst-case scenario for AI in media comments quoted by The Markup, January 2023.
Just a giant autocomplete machine
Gary Marcus, professor at NYU, quoted in a Globe and Mail opinion piece on ChatGPT, January 2023.
AGI will not happen in your lifetime
Grady Booch, IBM Fellow, posted this on Twitter on January 17, 2023, sparking a debate with Gary Marcus about AGI timelines.
garymarcus.substack.comAGI will not happen in your lifetime. Or will it?
This market does not think about you at all
From Zvi Mowshowitz's blog post 'On AI and Interest Rates', January 2023, discussing why interest rates fail to reflect beliefs about transformative AI.
- December 2022
George Hotz tweeted this reaction to ChatGPT's launch in December 2022, quoted in a Gary Marcus Substack post about whether ChatGPT threatens Google Search.
garymarcus.substack.comIs ChatGPT Really a “Code Red” for Google Search?
The main limitations are simply curiosity and imagination
Mustafa Suleyman, writing in WIRED in 2022, on the future accessibility of AI tools regardless of coding skill.
WIREDHumans and AI Will Understand Each Other Better Than Ever
Computers will speak our language
Mustafa Suleyman, in a 2022 WIRED essay, predicted humans would begin conversing naturally with machines in 2023.
WIREDHumans and AI Will Understand Each Other Better Than Ever
They will make ChatGPT look like a boring toy
Sam Altman, OpenAI co-founder and CEO, in a Twitter thread in December 2022 about the path toward AGI.
Headline phrase describing Google's internal alarm after ChatGPT's launch in December 2022, as reported by the New York Times.
The New York TimesA New Chat Bot Is a 'Code Red' for Google's Search Business
Not something that people can use reliably on a daily basis
Zoubin Ghahramani, who leads Google Brain, speaking to The New York Times about chatbots before ChatGPT's release.
There'll be an open-source ChatGPT within 6 months, surely
Nathan Lambert predicting the pace of open-source AI catching up to ChatGPT, in a December 2022 blog post.
interconnects.aiClosed-API vs Open-source continues: RLHF, ChatGPT, data moats
- November 2022
Altman's launch post for ChatGPT, 30 Nov 2022. OpenAI had provisioned for 100,000 users.
A close match for my philosophy
Elon Musk describing longtermism, an offshoot of effective altruism, quoted in a 2022 WIRED essay by Timnit Gebru.
WIREDEffective Altruism Is Pushing a Dangerous Brand of ‘AI Safety’
Zvi Mowshowitz, writing on his Substack about Meta's Diplomacy-playing AI, describing a take that labs intentionally build the scariest possible thing.
Something more profound than electricity or fire
Sundar Pichai, Google CEO, speaking on AI at the World Economic Forum in Davos, 2018.
VoxAI experts are increasingly afraid of what they’re creating - vox.com
Chinese Go grandmaster Ke Jie describing DeepMind's Go-playing AI, quoted in a 2022 article about Meta's Diplomacy AI Cicero.
It's no longer possible to have some fun by casually misusing it, happy?
Yann LeCun, Meta's chief scientist, tweeted this after Meta pulled the public demo of its Galactica language model three days after launch in November 2022.
MIT Technology ReviewWhy Meta’s latest large language model survived only three days online
- January 2022
Effective accelerationism.
- May 2019
Capture the light cone of all future value in the universe
Altman on what AGI could do for OpenAI, StrictlyVC, May 2019, "and that's for sure not okay for one group of investors to have".
- February 2019
How the press summarised OpenAI's decision not to publish GPT-2 in February 2019, "due to our concerns about malicious applications".
- April 2018
Ensure AGI benefits all of humanity
OpenAI's stated mission.
- January 2018
More profound than electricity or fire
Sundar Pichai, 2018.
The VergeGoogle CEO Sundar Pichai says AI is more profound than electricity or fire
- October 2016
People should stop training radiologists now
Geoffrey Hinton at the Creative Destruction Lab's Machine Learning and the Market for Intelligence conference in Toronto, 2016, predicting that deep learning would outperform radiologists within five years.
Creative Destruction Lab (YouTube)Geoff Hinton: On Radiology
- September 2005
Kurzweil's year for the singularity.
Ray Kurzweil's 2005 book title. He set the date at 2045.