But AGI is not the same as ASI (artificial superintelligence). To see the difference, let us zoom into what things might look like one year before the singularity. We also need to add a third line to the chart: the centaur (human + machine).
An analogy here is chess. Machine surpassed the average human in the late 1970s, and surpassed the top human (Kasparov) in 1997. But human + machine continued to beat machine alone all the way until around 2017.
What did the twilight of human + machine in chess look like? Actually, it did look like humans being relegated to more and more "high-level strategic thinking" functions, while bots managed the move-by-move. Very similar to vibe coding in 2026.
Before we get to a point where there are no areas where our input is economically helpful, we will be in a regime where there are only a few such areas. And because we humans are scarce, those few areas will become the global economy's bottleneck - they will be the only thing you can't optimize down to near-zero cost (and latency), and so all our attention will go toward those tasks.
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Alibaba allegedly ran 28.8 million fraudulent API exchanges across 25,000 fake accounts to steal Claude's intelligence. If confirmed, it's the largest AI model theft ever attempted. The same week, the White House restricted GPT 5.6 to 20 companies, OpenAI delayed its IPO, and Neuralink announced it may attempt brain-to-brain telepathy this year.
-- GPT 5.6 launches in three tiers: Sol, Terra, Luna all throttled by the White House.
-- Chinese proxy services offer Western frontier models at 90% discount. The trade: your reasoning traces get harvested for distillation.
-- OpenAI won't IPO below $1 trillion. Revenue is at $40–50B annually but they're burning $26B.
-- Elon's endgame for Neuralink is I/O layer for the singularity, allowing humans to couple with AI directly.
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this is my personal singularity moment
this post may sound like a paid ad. I only wish. I'm concerned, more so than happy. the world is changing, and, among the scenarios where AI goes terribly wrong, inequality is the most realistic, yet, the one Anthropic seems to be the least concerned about. I'm glad OpenAI is taking the opposite stance: *personal AGI for everyone*. I think this is a commendable position in the times we live. but who am I in the queue of the bread?
anyway, Fable is here, so I'll just report my first-hour experience
first of all, all my pet prompts are solved.
→ λ-calculus puzzles
→ bug questions
→ one-shot apps
all are trivial to it.
I don't have anything harder other than my
ongoing work
so, in the last several days, I've been toying with HVM5, a new interaction net evaluator with a faster loop.
after writing the first version, I left 32 GPT-5 agents working for ~20 hours each. this resulted in up to 2x speedups, but the file size increased by 2-fold and quality decreased significantly.
I then simplified the whole thing into an even simpler core, and left Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5 optimizing it for 8 hours. Opus got a legit 6% - 34% speedup in most benches. GPT got better results, but, sadly, an unusable file.
I then asked Fable to optimize it.
2 hours later, it landed a 1770% speedup in one case, 100%+ in other 4, and 22% in average. yes, in 2 hours it outperformed me, opus 4.8 and a swarm of gpt 5.5 agents, by one order of magnitude.
that could not possibly be legit. "it must be hardcoding the benchmarks" (GPT trauma). so I read its explanation and what it did was, indeed, the most high impact optimization one could try first. seems like HVM5 was wasting a lot of time garbage-collecting unused branches of pattern-match nodes. I had optimized that for static mats, but not for dynamic mats. skill issue. Fable figured how to do it for these, resulting in a massive speedup in some benches
but wait, is that *correct*? I'm not sure yet, it is credible, but this is the kind of thing that is very easy to get wrong on interaction nets. the problem is, when I was ready to start auditing Fable's solution so I could tell whether it was buggy or legit, it interrupted me to tell me it had found a massive bug on the code *I* had written.
... wait, what?
so... for garbage collection purposes, I stored a bit on lambda term pointers that meant "the variable bound by this lambda has been freed, so, its lambda must free whatever argument it is applied to". that's fine. yet, on duplicator nodes, I also used the same bit to mean "one of the duplicated variables was freed, so, treat this dup as a passthrough no-op". so, if a lambda entered a duplicator, it would mistake the lambda's collection bit for its own, resulting in corrupted interaction!
that's a mouthful, why I'm writing this?
just so you can appreciate the sheer absurdity of what just happened. I didn't ask it to find bugs. I asked it for an optimization. and even if I did ask it to find bugs, this bug is so astonishingly subtle and specific, identifying it takes mastering the domain to an extent that it beyond even me. I'd easily need hours or days to fix it, *if* I ever came across it. chances are it would just go unnoticed. and Fable found it and fixed it like it was nothing, while it was busy adding a 17x speedup to a file that neither I, nor Opus 4.8, nor a fleet of GPT 5.5 managed to barely make 2x faster.
oh and there is also another tab where it is also ripping through Bend's codebase and finishing everything I had to do
I don't know what to say anymore
this isn't about Anthropic or OpenAI, this is about our collective future as a species. the world is changing, and we need to be aware of it, and discuss how to handle this change.
receipt below . . .
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Larry Page wanted to build a digital god.
"He really seemed to want some sort of digital superintelligence. Basically a digital god, if you will. As soon as possible."
Elon Musk asked: "What about making sure humanity's okay here?"
Page called him a speciesist.
"I said yes, I'm a speciesist. You got me. What are you? I'm fully a speciesist. Busted."
Musk spent 10 minutes with Tucker Carlson explaining why he created OpenAI:
Tucker asked the basic question.
"All of a sudden AI is everywhere. People are playing with it on their phones. Is that good or bad?"
Musk starts with first principles.
"The smartest creatures as far as we know on this Earth are humans. That's our defining characteristic."
"We're obviously weaker than chimpanzees. Less agile. But we are smarter."
"Now. What happens when something vastly smarter than the smartest person comes along in silicon form?"
"It's very difficult to predict what will happen in that circumstance."
He explains the singularity.
"It's called the singularity. Like a black hole. Because you don't know what happens after that."
"It's hard to predict."
He argues for regulation.
"I think there should be some government oversight. Because it affects the public. It's a danger to the public."
"That's why we have the Food and Drug Administration. The Federal Aviation Administration. The FCC."
"We have these agencies to oversee things that affect the public. Where there could be public harm."
"You don't want companies cutting corners on safety. And then having people suffer as a result."
He addresses the perception that he fights regulators.
"People think I'm some sort of regulatory maverick that defies regulators on a regular basis. But this is actually not the case."
"Once in a blue moon, rarely, I will disagree with regulators. But the vast majority of the time my companies agree with the regulations and comply."
Tucker asks the obvious question.
"All regulations start with a perceived danger. Planes fall out of the sky. I don't think an average person playing with AI on his iPhone perceives any danger."
"Can you explain what you think the dangers might be?"
Musk's answer.
"AI is perhaps more dangerous than mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production."
"In the sense that it has the potential. It is a small probability, but it is not trivial."
"It has the potential of civilization destruction."
He explains the timing problem.
"Regulations are really only put into effect after something terrible has happened."
"If that's the case for AI, and we only put in regulations after something terrible has happened, it may be too late to put the regulations in place."
"They may be out of control at that point."
Tucker asks directly.
"It's conceivable that AI could take control and reach a point where you couldn't turn it off and it would be making the decisions for people?"
Musk's answer.
"Yeah. Absolutely."
"That's definitely the way things are headed."
He explains why OpenAI exists.
"Larry Page and I used to be close friends. I would stay at his house in Palo Alto. I would talk to him late in the night about AI safety."
"At least my perception was that Larry was not taking AI safety seriously enough."
Tucker asked what Page said.
"He really seemed to want some sort of digital superintelligence. Basically a digital god, if you will. As soon as possible."
Musk pushed back.
"I agree there's great potential for good. But there's also potential for bad."
"If you have some radical new technology, you want to take actions to maximize the probability it will do good. Minimize the probability it will do bad things."
"It can't just be barreling forward and hope for the best."
Then the speciesist moment.
"At one point I said: what about making sure humanity's okay here?"
"And then he called me a speciesist."
Tucker: "Did he use that term?"
"Yes."
"I said yes, I'm a speciesist. You got me. What are you? I'm fully a speciesist. Busted."
That was the last straw.
"At the time, Google had DeepMind. Google and DeepMind had three-quarters of all the AI talent in the world."
"They obviously had a lot of money and more computers than anyone else."
"We're in a unipolar world here. One company that has close to a monopoly on AI talent and computers. And the person who's in charge doesn't seem to care about safety."
"This is not good."
So he created the opposite.
"I thought: what's the furthest thing from Google?"
"A nonprofit that is fully open. Because Google was closed and for-profit."
"Open AI. Open source. Transparent. So people know what's going on."
"We don't want this to be a for-profit maximizing demon from hell that just never stops."
Tucker asks about the specific danger.
"The cool parts of AI are obvious. Write your college paper for you. Write a limerick about yourself. There's a lot that's fun and useful."
"But can you be more precise about what's potentially dangerous? What specifically are you worried about?"
Musk's answer.
"The pen is mightier than the sword."
"If you have a superintelligent AI that is capable of writing incredibly well. In a way that is very influential, convincing."
"And is constantly figuring out what is more convincing to people over time."
"And then enters social media. Twitter. Facebook. Others."
"And potentially manipulates public opinion in a way that is very bad."
"How would we even know?"
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