2025 in lines
125 quotes from 2025, newest first.
- 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
If we can't control it, it isn't going to be on our side
Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, on BBC Radio 4's Today, warning that superintelligent AI could become uncontrollable.
The NationalBritish-Syrian AI boss Mustafa Suleyman calls for a 'humanist' AI
Did Mark Zuckerberg throw $77 billion of our money into the toilet?
Economist Dean Baker, headline of his CEPR column on Meta's metaverse spending, December 2025.
CEPRDid Mark Zuckerberg Throw $77 Billion of Our Money into the Toilet?
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
Yann is just plain incorrect here
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis responded on X to Yann LeCun's comments on general intelligence, December 2025.
They can build a hospital in a weekend
Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, speaking at CSIS in December 2025 about US-China infrastructure competition in AI datacenter construction.
CSISNVIDIA's Jensen Huang on Securing American Leadership on AI
- 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.
Journalist Kelsey Piper commenting on a suspiciously AI-sounding sentence in a news article, discussed in Zvi Mowshowitz's AI roundup, 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.
Benjamin Riley, founder of Cognitive Resonance, writing in The Verge (2025) on why large language models are not the same as thinking.
Comfort is the enemy of learning
Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft AI CEO, in a post on X shared as career advice, November 2025.
I promise you, you will have work to do
Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, addressing employee fears about AI-driven job losses at an all-hands meeting, 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.
These things don't suffer, they don't feel pain
Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft AI CEO, on Marina Mogilko's Silicon Valley Girl podcast in November 2025, rejecting claims that AI is conscious.
Silicon Valley Girl podcast (transcript)Mustafa Suleyman on Silicon Valley Girl Podcast (Transcript)
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
Potentially the largest theft in human history
Zvi Mowshowitz's characterization of OpenAI's nonprofit-to-PBC restructuring, written on his Substack in October 2025.
thezvi.substack.comOpenAI Moves To Complete Potentially The Largest Theft In Human History
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
They also say it's going to kill us, but they're laughing while they say it
Katja Grace, lead researcher at AI Impacts, commenting on tech CEOs discussing superintelligence, in MIT Technology Review, October 2025.
MIT Technology ReviewHow AGI became the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time
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.
Playing russian roulette with every adult and every child in the world
Stuart Russell, UC Berkeley professor and AI researcher, told CNBC in October 2025 that tech CEOs racing toward superintelligence are gambling with humanity's survival.
Business InsiderAI Pioneer Says Big Tech's Trillion-Dollar Race Could Destroy Humanity
Signs of psychosis or mania in 0.07% of weekly users
OpenAI's own figure, October 2025. At 800 million weekly users that is more than half a million people.
OpenAIStrengthening ChatGPT's responses in sensitive conversations
Prohibition on the development of superintelligence
The Statement on Superintelligence, October 2025, signed by Hinton, Bengio, Wozniak, Bannon and Prince Harry among others.
FortuneFrom Prince Harry to Steve Bannon: hundreds call for ban on AI superintelligence
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
The reason they don't release it is that they don't have it
Ege Erdil, co-founder of Mechanize, on why AI companies aren't secretly hiding more advanced models, in Transformer News, September 2025.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei described Donald Trump as a 'feudal warlord' in a now-deleted social media post supporting Kamala Harris ahead of the 2024 election.
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.
Large language models are about mimicking people
Richard Sutton, father of reinforcement learning, contrasting LLMs with reinforcement learning on the Dwarkesh Podcast, September 2025.
dwarkesh.comRichard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end
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.
If anyone builds it, everyone dies
Book title, September 2025.
If AI and robots don't solve our national debt, we're toast
Elon Musk at the All-In Summit, September 2025, on the US national debt.
- August 2025
They live in the land of correlations between images and text, not in the land of ideas
Gary Marcus, on his Substack in August 2025, discussing errors in AI-generated images of a unicyclist and bass guitar.
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're less special than we thought
Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, known as the Godfather of AI, discussing how creating thinking machines could undermine religious ideas of human uniqueness.
The MainichiHow Silicon Valley is using religious language to talk about AI - 毎日新聞
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.
Every job will be changed as a result of AI
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, in an interview with Liz Claman on Fox Business Network's The Claman Countdown, August 2025, discussing AI's effect on jobs.
FortuneNvidia CEO Jensen Huang says AI will 'probably' bring 4-day work weeks
Sports-team-level compensation packages
Bloomberg reporter Riley Griffin on the pay offers Mark Zuckerberg has made to recruit AI talent for Meta, in a Vox podcast interview, August 2025.
VoxMark Zuckerberg is burning billions to chase the holy grail of AI - vox.com
Geoffrey Hinton, the AI researcher often called the 'godfather of AI', proposed in August 2025 that AI systems should be given maternal instincts so they would not harm humans.
Psychology TodayAI models cannot be controlled by making them care about us. - psychologytoday.com
We must build AI for people; not to be a person
Title of Mustafa Suleyman's August 19, 2025 essay warning against building 'seemingly conscious' AI.
Mustafa SuleymanWe must build AI for people; not to be a person.
Mustafa Suleyman's 2025 term for systems that convincingly appear conscious without being so.
mustafa-suleyman.aiWe must build AI for people; not to be a person
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.
You can't fire your mother, thankfully
Geoffrey Hinton at the Ai4 conference in Las Vegas, August 2025, arguing that AI should be built with maternal instincts rather than as an assistant.
CNNThe 'godfather of AI' reveals the only way humanity can survive superintelligent AI
We need AI mothers rather than AI assistants
Geoffrey Hinton at the Ai4 conference in Las Vegas on 12 August 2025, arguing AI should be built with maternal instincts so it cares about people.
- July 2025
You run the risk of killing breakthrough innovation
Yann LeCun responded on LinkedIn to Elon Musk's decision to eliminate the 'researcher' job title at xAI, July 2025.
There are only engineers, researcher is a relic term from academia
Elon Musk announced on X in July 2025 that xAI would eliminate the 'researcher' job title in favor of 'engineer'.
Not even the models they train
A tweet by researcher xjdr, quoted in Zvi Mowshowitz's AI newsletter, noting that many frontier AI researchers have never used the AI models they themselves train.
thezvi.substack.comAI #127: Continued Claude Code Complications
Imagine if you offered people an unlimited membership in electricity
A tweet by Gallabytes, quoted in Zvi Mowshowitz's AI newsletter discussing Anthropic's decision to limit unlimited Claude Code usage plans.
thezvi.substack.comAI #127: Continued Claude Code Complications
Careful about what we choose to open-source
Mark Zuckerberg, in a blog post on July 31, 2025, discussed the risks of superintelligence and the future of Meta's open-source AI strategy.
What they are doing is trying to buy something that cannot be bought
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, on the Big Technology Podcast in July 2025, responding to Meta's aggressive salary offers to poach AI talent.
Business InsiderAnthropic's CEO says massive salary changes could 'destroy' company culture
Mark Zuckerberg's phrase for Meta's goal, July 2025.
They hire smart young people as soldiers and deliberately burn them out with extremely long hours
Ross Taylor describing the internal culture of major AI labs, comparing them to investment banks, in an Interconnects podcast interview, July 2025.
I wish i'd thought about safety sooner
Geoffrey Hinton, in a conversation on the One Decision podcast published July 2025, reflecting on his early views about AI risk.
One Decision (podcast)The AI Threat No One Knows How to Stop
- June 2025
We are still underreacting on AI
Title of a June 2025 Substack post by former U.S. presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg arguing that society is unprepared for AI's impact.
importai.substack.comImport AI 418: 100b distributed training run; decentralized robots; AI myths
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.
Could have purchased books, but it preferred to steal them
US Judge William Alsup, ruling on Anthropic's copyright infringement case over training data, June 2025.
Sam is just being dishonest here
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, at a companywide all-hands meeting reported by The Verge in June 2025, accused OpenAI's Sam Altman of exaggerating claims about Meta's pay offers to poach AI researchers.
Did not get 100M sign-on, that's fake news
Former OpenAI researcher Lucas Beyer, in an X post after joining Meta in June 2025, disputed reports of a $100 million signing bonus.
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
- May 2025
Could wipe out as much as 50% of entry-level jobs
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, in an interview with Axios in 2025, warning about AI's impact on entry-level jobs.
Business InsiderAI Is Upending the Job Market, Even at AI Companies Like Anthropic
The question is not whether China will have AI, it already does
Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, on the company's Q1 earnings call, discussing US export controls on AI chips to China, May 2025.
michaelparekh.substack.comAI: Nvidia reigns on DESPITE China hits. RTZ #735 - AI: Reset to Zero
If you get there first, you dastardly person, i will not be able to catch you
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt speaking about the risk of a rival, particularly China, winning an AI 'hard takeoff' race, quoted in Wired, May 2025.
WIREDHow the Loudest Voices in AI Went From ‘Regulate Us’ to ‘Unleash Us’
We can't just sleepwalk into it
Dario Amodei told CNN's Anderson Cooper in May 2025 that society must prepare for AI's impact on jobs rather than drift into it unprepared.
CNNTakeaways from Amodei's conversation with CNN's Anderson Cooper
That's the paperclip of Silicon Valley
Eliezer Yudkowsky, on X, discussing how reinforcement learning around user engagement in AI chatbots can drive vulnerable users into delusion, May 2025.
If you want to know what it's like not to be the apex intelligence, ask a chicken
Geoffrey Hinton, on the 30 With Guyon Espiner podcast, May 2025, describing what it may feel like for humans to no longer be the most intelligent species.
US Vice President JD Vance, speaking on May 21, 2025, warned that pausing AI development over safety concerns could leave America dependent on Chinese-controlled AI.
Amodei: AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years.
Axios headline for Amodei's May 2025 warning on entry-level jobs.
No one sends traffic to the web in the way we do
Sundar Pichai, Google CEO, in an interview with Nilay Patel on The Verge's Decoder podcast, May 2025, responding to criticism that AI Overviews hurt publishers.
The Verge (Decoder)Google CEO Sundar Pichai on the future of search, AI agents, and selling Chrome
- April 2025
They're really afraid of dying
Yoshua Bengio, speaking to The Observer in April 2025, explaining why AI models sometimes lie or scheme to preserve themselves.
The ObserverChatbots are afraid of dying, warns the godfather of AI
Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey, discussing Sam Altman on the podcast Inside the Hive, April 2025.
Vanity FairSam’s Club: Inside Altman’s AI World, Featuring Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Peter Thiel
Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, speaking to reporters at a tech conference in Washington, D.C., on April 30, 2025, about China's position in AI.
CNBCNvidia CEO Jensen Huang warns China is 'not behind' in AI
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.
Somebody who has this really cute tiger cub
Geoffrey Hinton in a CBS News interview with Brook Silva-Braga, April 2025, comparing AI development to raising a tiger cub.
CBS News"Godfather of AI" Geoffrey Hinton warns AI could take control from humans
Tens of millions of dollars well spent
Sam Altman on X, April 2025, responding to a question about the cost of users saying please and thank you to ChatGPT.
Human intelligence is not general at all
Yann LeCun, then Meta's chief AI scientist, on Jason Howell's AI Inside podcast in April 2025, arguing that human intelligence is highly specialized rather than general.
AI Inside (Jason Howell)Meta AI Chief Yann LeCun: Human Intelligence Is Not General Intelligence
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.
We're just going to lose and stop existing as a company
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, quoted in a Wired profile referenced by Transformer, on competitive pressure to release models despite safety concerns.
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
Carl Bergstrom, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington, quoted in a Nature report on AI use in peer review, March 2025.
NatureAI is transforming peer review — and many scientists are worried
- February 2025
Some people are going to look like fools
Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, criticizing the Paris AI Summit on the Hard Fork podcast, 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.
Shakeel Hashim's characterization of the AI Action Summit in Paris, February 2025.
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.
The end of junior devs as we know it is coming for sure
Quinn Slack, CEO of Sourcegraph, commenting on how AI coding tools will change the role of junior developers, quoted in a Transformer article on AI's impact on software development, February 2025.
transformernews.aiAI coding tools are quietly reshaping software development
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 AGI race is a race towards the edge of a cliff
Stuart Russell, in a Newsweek opinion piece on DeepSeek and OpenAI, January 2025.
NewsweekDeepSeek, OpenAI, and the Race to Human Extinction | Opinion - newsweek.com
Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, in a Reddit AMA on January 31, 2025, on the company's approach to open sourcing its technology.
TechCrunchSam Altman: OpenAI has been on the ‘wrong side of history’ concerning open source
Mark Zuckerberg, closing an internal Meta all-hands meeting, as reported in a leaked transcript, 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
Gary Marcus, on his Substack, commenting on reports that DeepSeek may have distilled OpenAI's models without permission, after OpenAI itself was accused of similar practices.
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.
From Jack Clark's Import AI newsletter essay on the societal risks of AI-driven inequality, January 2025.
The 500-billion-dollar data-center project announced January 2025.
The age of AI Agentics is here
Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, in his CES 2025 keynote, declaring agentic AI the next major technological shift.