2024 in lines
116 quotes from 2024, newest first. Often quoted: Sam Altman, Gary Marcus, Jensen Huang, Yann LeCun, Dario Amodei. Open the Time Machine.
- 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.
We will become like three-year-old children
Geoffrey Hinton, in remarks reported by Mail Online after receiving the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, comparing humans' future relationship to superintelligent AI.
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.
Facebook 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.
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.
𝗼𝟯 “𝗔𝗥𝗖 𝗔𝗚𝗜” 𝗽𝗼𝘀𝘁𝗺𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗲𝗺 𝗺𝗲𝗴𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱: 𝘄𝗵𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 𝗴𝗼𝘁 𝗵𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱, 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘄𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘄𝗿𝗼𝗻𝗴, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘁 𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗺𝗲𝗮𝗻𝘀
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.
Google CEO Pichai tells employees to gear up for big 2025: 'The stakes are high'
Anthropic research, December 2024: a model that behaves aligned during training to avoid being changed.
- 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.
They decided for all of us, and potentially put us at risk
Gary Marcus, cognitive scientist and NYU professor emeritus, speaking at a Town Hall Seattle event in November 2024 about Meta's decision to open-source its AI models.
How do you tame AI? Scientist sees a need for regulating bots like drugs or airplanes
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.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, speaking at Hong Kong University, November 2024, on how he questions AI chatbots to learn.
5 follow-up questions Nvidia's CEO asks his AI to 'torture' it into teaching him new things
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.
Intelligence gives power. so who's going to control that power?
Yoshua Bengio, AI pioneer, speaking to CNBC at the One Young World Summit in Montreal, November 2024.
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
We totally believe in treating adult users like adults
Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, in a Reddit AMA on October 31, 2024, discussing possible future NSFW content in ChatGPT.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says lack of compute capacity is delaying the company’s products
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.
More humanoid robots than there are people
Elon Musk speaking at the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh, October 2024, predicting robot populations by 2040.
10,000 times smarter than humans
Masayoshi Son speaking at the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh, October 2024, forecasting artificial super intelligence by 2035.
Geoffrey Hinton, discussing AI risk with Global News in Toronto, October 2024, referencing James Cameron's comments on the Terminator films.
Why the ‘godfather of AI’ says Industrial Revolution-style job changes loom
The person who uses AI to automate that 20% is going to take your job
Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, speaking at Nvidia's AI Summit in Mumbai, October 2024, on AI and job displacement.
Nvidia's billionaire CEO says AI can do a lot of things, except take his job
India should not export flour to import bread
Jensen Huang recounting a remark by Prime Minister Narendra Modi about AI as national infrastructure, at the NVIDIA AI Summit in Mumbai, October 2024.
India should not export flour to import bread: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang on PM Narendra Modi
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.
‘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.
All watched over by machines of loving grace
Brautigan's full line, 1967.
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
There's never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes
Mira Murati, announcing her departure as OpenAI's CTO on X, September 2024.
VCs are rushing to meet with former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati in hopes of funding a new company
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.
Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, blog post, September 2024, on the risk of AI becoming inaccessible without enough infrastructure.
‘Superintelligent’ AI Is Only a Few Thousand Days Away: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
Could give the public a false sense of security
California Governor Gavin Newsom, explaining his September 2024 veto of AI safety bill SB 1047.
California’s governor has vetoed a historic AI safety bill - vox.com
You can't just convert a non-profit into a for-profit, that is illegal
Elon Musk commenting on reports that OpenAI plans to restructure from a non-profit to a for-profit company, September 2024.
If you fire everyone who joined your non-profit, does it auto convert to a for profit?
Reaction on social media to reports that OpenAI would restructure into a for-profit benefit corporation, September 2024.
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.
Sam Altman in a note to OpenAI staff, shared on X on September 25, 2024, after CTO Mira Murati and two other senior leaders announced their departures.
Gary Marcus's recurring warning that OpenAI could someday be remembered like WeWork, cited in his September 2024 Substack post about executive departures and losses.
Reactor restart to power Microsoft data centers, announced September 2024.
- August 2024
We're biological systems, and these are digital systems
Geoffrey Hinton on the fundamental difference between human and AI systems, quoted in a 2024 Strategist article about AI risk in warfare.
The models learn, as we all do, from what has come before
From OpenAI's legal filing in a copyright class-action lawsuit brought by authors including Michael Chabon and Sarah Silverman, Northern District of California, August 2024.
OpenAI Called ChatGPT As a Witness in a Major Copyright Lawsuit
Legislation with real teeth to address the risks
Geoffrey Hinton commented on California's AI safety bill (SB 1047) in a statement after it passed the state legislature, 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.
Nvidia sustains triple-digit revenue growth amid AI building boom
Innovation and safety can go hand in hand
California Senator Scott Wiener commenting after SB 1047, an AI safety bill, passed the state Senate 29-9, August 2024.
Senator Wiener’s Landmark AI Bill Heads to the Governor - California State Portal | CA.gov
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.
AI 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.
Don't give power to people or structures that can't be held accountable
From William Saunders' 'high risk decision principles' shared with Gary Marcus after leaving OpenAI's alignment team.
The EU's AI regulation, in force since August 2024.
- 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.
A CIO canceled a Microsoft AI deal. The reason should worry the entire tech industry.
Intelligence too cheap to meter
Sam Altman describing GPT-4o-mini upon its 2024 release, quoted in an Interconnects analysis of ChatBotArena rankings.
They planned the launch after-party prior to knowing if it was safe to launch
An OpenAI whistleblower told the Washington Post that GPT-4o's safety testing was rushed through in one week before its launch.
AI companies are falling short on their promises to the White House
What if the western powers decide to turn their models off?
Darius Liu, team leader of Southeast Asia's SEA-LION language model project, quoted in Fortune, July 2024, on reliance on Western AI models.
From Sam Altman's open letter in The Washington Post, July 2024, on whether the future of AI will be democratic or authoritarian.
‘Urgent question’: Sam Altman raises alarm bells in open letter on future of AI
It will take a crisis to make us take this stuff seriously
Scale AI CEO Alex Wang, speaking on the ChinaTalk podcast in 2024, on US complacency regarding AI and frontier data compared to China.
The genie is possibly out of the bottle
From a 2024 blog post by Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio arguing that most scientific principles needed for AGI may already exist.
Import AI 379: FlashAttention-3; Elon's AGI datacenter; distributed training.
- June 2024
Our company is thirty days from going out of business
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's unofficial motto, which he has recited to staff for years, as reported by CNA in June 2024.
CNA Explains: The story of Nvidia's rise to become the world's No 1 company
That has been freeware, if you like
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, in a CNBC interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin in June 2024, describing content published on the open web since the 1990s.
Microsoft’s AI boss thinks it’s perfectly okay to steal content if it’s on the open web
Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel speaking about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at the Aspen Ideas Festival, June 2024.
Sam Altman speaking at Aspen Ideas, June 2024, on AI's economic potential, as cited by Gary Marcus.
Sam Altman speaking at Aspen Ideas, June 2024, on AI's future capabilities, as cited by Gary Marcus.
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.
Safety is not a model property
Dean W. Ball, AI policy researcher, discussing California's SB 1047 bill in an interview with Nathan Lambert on Interconnects, June 2024.
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.
The more you buy the more you save
Jensen Huang's running keynote joke about GPU economics.
You're not going to lose your job to AI, you're going to lose it to somebody who uses AI
Jensen Huang, repeated in keynotes since 2024.
- 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.
I'll perplexity it rather than i'll google it
Sivesh Sukumar, VC at Balderton, told Business Insider in May 2024 about the rise of Perplexity as a Google search competitor.
A wave of AI 'acquihires' is coming. Here's who could be looking for deals.
Companies are raising money faster than they're growing
Somesh Dash, general partner at IVP, commented to Business Insider in May 2024 on the pace of AI startup fundraising versus growth.
A wave of AI 'acquihires' is coming. Here's who could be looking for deals.
We learned about ChatGPT on Twitter
Helen Toner, former OpenAI board member, speaking on The TED AI Show podcast about not being informed in advance of ChatGPT's 2022 launch.
What really went down at OpenAI and the future of regulation w/ Helen Toner (Transcript)
That's nothing, you're going soft, try harder
Elon Musk's reply to Yann LeCun on X during their public feud, May 2024.
I very much dislike his vengeful politics
Meta AI chief scientist Yann LeCun on Elon Musk, in a public exchange on X, May 2024.
Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, in a post on X in May 2024, argued AI is not a natural phenomenon that will spontaneously become dangerous.
Former OpenAI board members Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley wrote in The Economist, May 2024, describing concerns senior leaders had shared about Sam Altman.
AI firms mustn't govern themselves, say ex-members of OpenAI's board
Current LLMs are dumber than a house cat
Yann LeCun, 2024.
Altman's one-word post on X the evening of the GPT-4o voice demo, 13 May 2024. The film it names ends with the AI leaving.
- April 2024
Drake posted this on Instagram in response to an AI deepfake of himself rapping a song by Ice Spice, months before his own use of AI-cloned voices in a diss track.
No one is safe from AI deepfakes—from Elon Musk to your local high school principal
Gary Marcus, in a Substack essay (April 2024), warning that without AI legislation from Congress the public is unprotected.
We can’t trust the fox to guard the henhouse, especially when it comes to AI
Open sourcing improves our models
Mark Zuckerberg on Meta's Q1 2024 earnings call, defending the decision to make Llama 3 open source.
Meta's big, expensive AI bet hinges on giving its models away for free
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.
Theological questions should not be posed to a computer
Author and composer Peter Kwasniewski reacted on Twitter to the Catholic Answers AI chatbot 'Father Justin,' April 2024.
Zuckerberg, on Dwarkesh Patel's podcast in April 2024, explaining why Meta needs to pursue AGI-level AI for its products.
They literally don't know the difference between truth and falsehood
Gary Marcus, on his Substack in April 2024, explaining why LLMs hallucinate compared to human errors.
- 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.
Gary Marcus, on his Substack in March 2024, criticizing the reported Microsoft-OpenAI 'Stargate' $100B project.
The Second Worst $100B Investment in The History of AI? - Marcus on AI
They get rich, we pay the price
Gary Marcus, writing on his Substack in March 2024, argued that AI companies profit while society bears the costs of generative AI's harms.
The race between positive and negative applications of Generative AI is on – and not looking pretty
He's like Taylor Swift, but for tech
Mark Zuckerberg replying on Instagram in March 2024 to a user who asked who he was standing with in a photo with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
This is the first time my p(doom) has gone down sharply since the release of gpt-3
Janus, an AI researcher, commented on Twitter/X in March 2024 about their reaction to Claude 3's release.
Crypto exchange whose collapse in 2022 took the movement's biggest donor with it.
That science fair phase needs to end
Kai-Fu Lee, chairman of Sinovation Ventures, speaking at the Fortune Innovation forum in Hong Kong, March 2024, on LLM startups prioritizing research over commercialization.
Leading China VC Kai-Fu Lee warns an investor reckoning is coming for unprofitable AI companies
Email from a production company to voice actress Sara Poyzer, informing her the BBC had approved an AI-generated voice instead of hers, March 2024.
Stability AI founder Emad Mostaque's tweet about Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's dominance in AI, March 2024.
- 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.
The brain is an existence proof that general intelligence is possible at all
Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, discussing neuroscience and AI on the Dwarkesh Podcast, February 2024.
Demis Hassabis — Scaling, superhuman AIs, AlphaZero atop LLMs, AlphaFold
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.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai calls AI tool's responses 'completely unacceptable'
Grimes commenting on Twitter about the Google Gemini image generation controversy, calling it accidental performance art, February 2024.
For over 30 years, i've heard 'XYZ will kill coding'
Industry analyst Patrick Moorhead responding to Jensen Huang's claim that AI ends the need to teach kids to code, 2024.
Jensen Huang says AI is ending era of teaching kids to code - The Register
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.
Inside the funding frenzy at Anthropic, one of AI’s hottest startups
We don't know why they make decisions and neither do they
From an essay by Erik J. Larson on Mind Matters (2024) arguing that current AI systems are opaque even to their creators.
If AI's Don't Know What They're Doing, Can We Hope to Explain It?
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
Dan Potter, creative director at Creative Works London, discussing the AI-generated Guns N' Roses video 'The General' in a 2024 Decrypt interview.
How Guns N' Roses Used AI to Create Wild New Music Video 'The General'
I would really want my 14-year-old to use these tools
Sam Altman discussing teen use of AI tools at the Common Sense Media summit in San Francisco, January 2024.
MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, writing in WIRED, predicted underwhelming AI performance despite grand promises.
OpenAI’s Got 9.9 Problems, and Twitch Ain’t One - Marcus on AI
Human beings must control the machines instead of having the machines control us
Chinese Premier Li Qiang speaking on AI governance at Davos, January 2024.
Gary Marcus's term for baffling failures of neural network systems, used in his January 2024 Substack post about AI image generation mistakes.
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.
AI's inbuilt tendency toward uncontrolled spread
From Suleyman's 2024 Foreign Affairs essay 'Containment for AI,' describing AI's tendency to proliferate.
Models trained with hidden behaviour that survives safety training (Anthropic, January 2024).
Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training
Low-effort generated content flooding the web.