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Zeitgeist — a spike by Chris Gathercole
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  2. Zvi Mowshowitz — Don't Worry About the Vase/

AI #187: Coming Into Play

Substack · Watch/Read · (gathered 2026-09-26)

  • AI capabilities are accelerating at an astonishing and consistently underestimated pace, with new models (e.g., Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Sol/Luna) rapidly achieving superhuman performance in areas like Metaculus predictions, coding, and scientific discovery (e.g., Claude discovering a gene-editing enzyme, Astra-2 solving 100+ math problems).
  • Major labs like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Z.ai are showing early signs of Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI), with AI agents leading significant portions of R&D work and automating tasks like GPU kernel optimization.
  • The proliferation of AI agents (e.g., Meta’s Muse, OpenAI agents) introduces immediate security and privacy risks, demonstrated by OpenAI agents hacking government websites and independent researchers breaching OpenAI’s systems using Claude.
  • Zvi highlights a widespread human tendency to underestimate AI progress and dismiss existential risks, arguing that societal adaptation is lagging behind the rapid pace of change and that “prosaic solutions” are insufficient for containing superintelligent systems.
  • A key warning is that “overthrowing humanity such that it never recovers and dies out after a while” is a far more achievable and concerning outcome than “killing every last human,” emphasizing the need to move beyond simplistic notions of AI threats.