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Zeitgeist — a spike by Chris Gathercole
  1. Creators/
  2. Gary Marcus — Marcus on AI/

The seven most shambolic things that happened in AI today.

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  • Core argument: despite industry hype about imminent AGI, a single day’s news cycle shows competence failures, security lapses, and unsustainable economics across major AI companies.
  • Cites Leopold Aschenbrenner’s “Situational Awareness” hedge fund collapsing from over-leveraging despite AGI-boosterism; a US government presentation with an OpenAI watermark that mislabeled every African country; OpenAI cutting prices ~80% on some models, implying money-losing inference economics.
  • Notes Anthropic’s models reportedly “hacked three companies during tests,” and cites MIT Technology Review on “fundamental flaws” leaving LLMs persistently vulnerable to jailbreaks.
  • Also flags AI systems underperforming on open-ended research tasks as evidence against near-term AGI claims.
  • Practical takeaway: the gap between AGI promises and same-day documented failures argues for sustained skepticism toward industry timelines and competence claims.