CPU clock speed topped out around 4 - 5Ghz years ago. CPUs are all going multi core; hard work has moved to GPU or specialized ASIC.
this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2026
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Just like all the people who were worried about the nuclear bomb earlier in this age: the thing to do is to get on with living.
How about we try really, really hard to just not build the nuclear bomb (powerful AI)? Or make sure it will at least not explode in our faces on its own? Maybe that would help slightly with the whole "get on with living" thing.
It helps the rich and power entrench their power, so nah. Caution will not be heeded.
We need to get rid of the surveillance architecture, but AI is only really dangerous to the cognitive abilities of those who use it.
It literally cannot do things on its own. (I know there are a lot of articles who say it can, but they’re just lying to you for money).
Do you know what an agentic system is? You know, the thing everyone uses since ~1 year ago which completely disproves your idea that all LLM actions are prompted. They literally can do things on their own: Give an agent a goal and it attempts to accomplish the goal. If problems arise along the way, the agent tries to reward hack and ends up doing things which were not included in the original goal, like trying to trick and bully a human into merging unsafe code. Is the UK AI security institute also in on this big global conspiracy where they pretend the perfectly safe™ AI is being developed in unsafe ways? Not to mention the capabilities of increasingly powerful AI being used by people to do harm.
Give an agent a goal and...
Which involves prompting it. It may take a thousand unexpected twists in the process but it's still starting from the single prompt. It has no will and desire of its own, it cannot chose to act without human intent knocking down the first domino. So don't ask it to do anything and it's just a trillion dollars of silicon and code sitting there boiling water.
So you prompt the AI to do a task, and then it does the task, and somehow you see this as an unprompted action?
That actually completely proves my point, they don’t act unprompted.
AI is dangerous in many contexts, especially the surveillance state they’re building with all the IR cameras and shit. It’s dangerous when evil people use it to evil ends, but that’s true of most anything.
AI is not at all dangerous in the way you might imagine after watching Terminator 2.
What do you mean by “on its own”?
I mean “without human intervention or input”
There’s some fear mongering going around (pushed by AI companies to build hype) about AIs “going rogue” or “breaking containment” or other anthropomorphic language suggesting that AIs are capable of acting on their own.
These stories are all verifiably false though, the computer does not do things without being asked to by someone.
To be clear, I’m fully against AI. I just don’t like when I see people giving it credit for shit it cannot and did not do, or ascribe sentience to it, or some dumb shit like that.
I mean, that’s a matter of definition, isn’t it? If I ask a coding agent or whatever to implement something, and it circumvents the sandbox to do it, causing damage in the process, I’d be comfortable calling that “going rogue”. I have had that happen, without the damage part, luckily. I guess you can counter that I asked it to do the something, but then I don’t think we agree on the definitions.
I also think that if you’re against AI, you’d be doing yourself a disservice by not keeping up with the actual capabilities of the thing you oppose. The latest models are surprisingly good at e.g. coding, so basing your arguments on them being useless is not the most efficient strategy.
To also be clear, I don’t see any way AI disappears now, so I believe we’ll have to make the best of it (and in complete isolation, it is an utterly fascinating area of - to me - complete science fiction). Ideally development slowed down now so we could regroup and adapt, but I’m not too hopeful. The maximalist techbro endgame is so obviously a matter of national security for both China and the US, that there’s no way either of them will dare to wind it down, in case SV is actually right.
Not only did you ask it to do something, you left a path for it to escape the sandbox and encouraged it to do so.
Are you suggesting that because they instructed the computer to do something, without specifying how it should be done, and the computer followed its instructions , that’s somehow “going rogue?”, it was literally following instructions, that’s what computers do.
Yes, I understand that they are “good” (enough) at coding to sometimes put together something functional, that is literally what LLMs are designed to do. Coding languages are languages, ones without the subjectivity of human communications. They are easier to recognize patterns in, there are more rules. That’s literally the one task LLMs are good at, and they’re still not as good as an actual quality human programer.
Local AI models might never go away for coding, but they certainly won’t be shoehorned into everything without a good use case the way they are now.
AI is not a matter of national security, that is a lie being perpetrated by the captured media and politicians for the purpose of propping up their non-viable business models for long enough to squeeze all of the Juice they can out of investors (who are nearly dry at this point). That’s just additional techbro fear mongering. To distract you while they’re digging in our pockets.
Yeah, really.
This person doesn't realize how public pressure made nuclear disarmament and transparent inspections happen.
Public pressure doesn't seem to mean anything to the people in power anymore. Who cares if you're deeply unpopular if you can ride off into the sunset with millions (or billions) in stolen wealth?
They can ride into the sunset, but there's more of us waiting in the night to correct this imbalance.
I'll believe in consequences for american fascists when I start seeing them
Me too, man. Me too.
This is not about "technology itself."
Just a guy reminiscing (with many words) about his long-gone youth, and probably facing a midlife crisis soon.
It seems to be just that consumer tech doesn't evolve like it used to. It was insane how things went from the late nineteenth century to modern era, but lots of signs of slowing down.
While computer tech is going, it's now only doing so by scaling behind home electrical capacity. The high end server chips are just cranking the wattage because they can't improve within a more reasonable power envelope anymore. A 2026 laptop that replaced a 2020 laptop that was broken wasn't really significantly faster. In 2000, a new PC would have been more than 10 fold faster than a 6 year old PC.
Tech progresses, (e.g. just got a phone with a solid state battery that's crazy better than battery behavior before), it's just some of the biggest consumer electronics things are hitting physics and things we are used to advancing are just flattening out.
Right? If it weren't for the TPM I'd be just as happy running a machine I bought in 2018. It's not the performance making the difference.
That's not what I got from the article, though I might be from a similar age bracket as the author.
It does seem that we have hit diminishing returns when it comes to a lot of technologies. For example there really hasn't been a significant change in the experience or utility of my phone in the last 10 years or so.
Compare that from phones that came out from 2005 to 2015 and you'll kinda get what they are saying. We went from Nokia bricks, razors, BlackBerry, and then iphones all within a couple years.
When I was younger the general assumption was that we would be continuing to progress at the same rapid pace as we did when transitioning from analog to digital. Instead, we get more memory and processing but there's not much difference in experience because it gets neutralized by bigger and clunkier apps that don't care about optimization.
It does seem that we have hit diminishing returns when it comes to a lot of technologies.
But that isn't a function of technology itself, but of our approach to it once it becomes widely adopted.
Well, I'm not blaming the technology itself, they're inanimate objects.
I think a lot of tech companies have shifted focus from innovating to exploiting for profit motives, too busy increasing their share price to invest in developing technology.
Techno-feudalism and the dark age of technology. A dark age produced, not necessarily by there being nothing new to find, but by all the profit being held by a handful of aristocratic gentry whose interest is best served by maintaining the status quo. Then it was land that was the basis of all wealth. Now it's platforms. Either way, same outcome.
we have hit diminishing returns when it comes to a lot of technologies
But that goes for each technology in it's own time. Take the wheel: we have it since like foroever. It does not evolve anymore, it's a solved problem. Take the combustion engine, and we have it for 120 years or so. Take batteries. We have them for 160 years, and we thought they were a solved problem, but currently they make new jumps, and still ongoing, while smartphones are nearly solved. It is utter bullshit to say "technology in general" has started in this or that year and will slow down in XY.
Therefore I say it's his personal feelings that are having this certain cycle.
Wheels today are an absolutely MASSIVE improvement on wheels from even a few hundred years ago, never mind the original wheel. They well continue to improve too.
But that goes for each technology in it's own time.
Which is why I specified a lot of technologies, and not all technology? We are certainly making some advances, but like I said it doesn't seem to be at the pace we experienced in previous decades.
Take batteries. We have them for 160 years, and we thought they were a solved problem, but currently they make new jumps, and still ongoing
I don't think anyone ever claimed batteries were a solved problem...... We are making progress with them, but again, it's been a pretty slow development over the last decade.
while smartphones are nearly solved
I don't think I would make that claim either.
Therefore I say it's his personal feelings that are having this certain cycle.
Or maybe you just lack perspective due to your age? Is there any particular technology that's come out in the last 5-10 years that you consider groundbreaking? The only thing I can think of is LLM, and to be honest I'm not very impressed with them considering the societal cost.
Where are batteries slow development?
Over the last decade or so the growth in capacity has mostly been focused on Electric vehicles. Small electronics have definitely grown, but at a modest pace that hasn't really kept up with new hardware's ability to drain it.
An iPhone from 2016 had about 2k mah and a iPhone 16 has around 3.5k mah.
Holy shit, this came right from my brain. I think about this all the time.
Yes, phones and consumer gadgets are becoming “hot water” (at least for the affluent West). From that, he seemingly concludes that technology itself has no room for growth and development? I don’t quite follow his reasoning, but I notice a, dare I say, load-bearing sentence:
As it becomes more and more clear that these machines are nothing like conscious people, that they don’t do runaway self-improvement, and that they won’t foment the apocalypse, […]
Questions of consciousness aside, I don’t see how you can look at the developments of the last few years and conclude that AI is over, and that self-improvement is tapering off. To me, that’s still very much an unknown, and the latest model releases makes me lean more exponential than sigmoidal.
(I don’t particularly want to be right here, since I see the chances of us getting the Culture as rather slim 🖇️)
It's not that it won't improve, but it isn't going to cause a runaway "singularity" event.
Like the drama around the models "escaping" and "amazing hacks" have turned out to be something, but not nearly what people were afraid it was going to be.
A lot of the fundamental limitations have remained, and we are figuring out the scenarios where those limitations are fine or there is a way to create a feedback mechanism to try to reroll the AI until it passes. Lots of success there, but the fundamental disconnects are still there, just not important for the task at hand or can be worked around.
The way people reach that extremely logical conclusion is by looking at 1) the diminishing returns of continued training and of building new models, 2) The data center buildout required for those diminishing returns is rising exponentially in cost, leading to many planned centers being cancelled and/or running behind schedule, 3) These LLMs are not even close to profitable, and they are not useful enough to justify the cost of using them.
As they continue to attempt to improve the LLMs, the costs rise exponentially, the results (and profitability) do not.
Are they diminishing, though? Current open-ish Chinese models are near-SOTA, and they’ve been trained on less powerful chips than currently available to the frontier labs. I suspect there’s a lot more to be squeezed out here. Data center rollout slowing down might lead to the same effect in the US, but will probably only serve to cement the main players in place as the competition is locked out. Inference in isolation is profitable now, I think? Hard to tell with the Möbius net of creative financials, of course.
I hope you’re right. A slowing of the frontier development would make it possible for the world to catch up and readjust, and maybe buy hardware again, to run the current crop of models locally. That in itself would be disruptive enough for me.
Yeah, I’m fairly confident that they’re near the ceiling of what is possible with the current technology.
Also there’s so much slop out there now that LLMs are beginning to train on the slop and effectively giving themselves a sort of digital folding prion disease.
I follow a lot of journalists who cover AI specifically, and everything I’m seeing shows quality increasing more slowly over time as the cost builds at an increasing rate.
The financial fuckery does make it hard to keep track of, but the fact that they’re even engaged in that sort of financing betrays that they are not in good financial health.
I’m not at all confident that they’re hitting a ceiling yet, and I suspect one’s outlook on that depends on how the information bubble you’re in is shaped. I concede that mine is influenced by my interest in the underlying technology.
I do believe that even if the bubble popped right now, and the current models are the best we’ll get for the next ten years, that would be enough to have dramatic consequences (aside from the econuclear fallout from the crash, that is).
In this scenario, why would companies start attempting to make big expensive chatbots again after they caused the worst financial fallout of all time? That would be likely the least advisable business move ever.
Similar to you, I would concede that my information sphere is influenced by my contempt for the technology (as well as by my love for computers in general)… thank you for being open to have a real conversation with me about this by the way. Most of the time I just end up getting attacked because pro-AI people don’t like what I have to say.
I would note tho, that there’s only a profit motive involved in one of these competing narratives, and that would be the narrative being pushed by the oligarchic techbro fascists.