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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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Trump deletes post depicting him as Jesus-like figure after backlash

Faced with growing backlash, US President Donald Trump appears to have removed a controversial Truth Social post depicting himself as a Jesus-like figure.

The AI-generated image, which showed Trump appearing to heal a sick man in a hospital bed, sparked fierce backlash from both sides of the US political spectrum, including from some of Trump's most ardent supporters. (...)

The now-deleted image showed Trump, wearing a white robe, with a glowing hand on the forehead of a sick man, which critics said was similar to religious paintings showing Jesus healing the infirm.

The background of the images included the Statue of Liberty, a large US flag fluttering, fighter jets and an eagle, as well as a nurse, a woman praying and what appeared to be a soldier in uniform. (...)

Criticism of the image came swiftly, including from figures considered close to Trump and the administration.

"This should be deleted immediately," wrote Sean Feucht, a Christian activist who is working on a series of faith-based events to mark the 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence this year. (...)

Riley Gaines, a prominent conservative activist, wrote that "God shall not be mocked".

Much of the criticism also came from faith-based US news outlets.

"This goes too far. It crosses the line," wrote David Brody, a journalist with the Christian Broadcasting Network. "A supporter can back the mission and reject this."

If the image had been satirical, people would have dismissed it as too over the top. But Trump's taste is such that he posted this thing unironically.

Any Trump supporters care to steelman this? To me, the most parsimonious explanation is that Trump is a narcissist with a god complex.

Any Trump supporters care to steelman this? To me, the most parsimonious explanation is that Trump is a narcissist with a god complex.

Maybe he just has dementia and got confused? Did he post it in the evening?

Perhaps an all too literal episode of this (props to Scott of course):

Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert, where he was tempted by the Devil. After various lesser trials and temptations, the Devil led Jesus to the top of an exceedingly high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world. And they stood there together, gazing upon the vista below.

"Behold," said Satan, mostly to break the awkward silence. "all the kingdoms of the world."

"They're very nice," said Jesus.

Satan's features - still faintly angelic - formed into a pout. "Really?" he asked. "Because I worked so hard corrupting them and turning them against one another, and..."

"No," said Jesus. "Not like that. I was just trying to be polite, really. They're teeming with sin and abomination."

Satan beamed. Some more awkward silence.

"So," said Jesus. "Is this the point at which you offer me lordship over all these kingdoms, if I only I bow down and worship you?"

"Nah," said Satan. "Like I said, they're kind of crappy. I'm here to tempt you, not insult you. I was planning something more interesting."

He waved his hand over the panorama, and it expanded in a hard-to-describe way. The three-dimensional view became four-dimensional; the vista became a manifold.

"Behold," said Satan again, "all the kingdoms of the world. Now and forever. Before you, the entire scope of history."

Jesus hesitated, not really sure what the polite response would be.

"You could at least smile!" said Satan. "Look! These people love you!"

Sure enough, it was true. Many of the kingdoms before them were Christian, building great cathedrals and writing beautiful works of theology in Jesus' name. Among the remainder, many were Muslim, revering him as one of the greatest of prophets.

"It's pretty encouraging," Jesus agreed. "So what's the catch?"

"Always the catch with you people," said Satan. "Well, if you insist. Take a look particularly at the psychiatric hospitals."

Jesus gazed through the manifold, where ten thousand psychiatric hospitals presented themselves simultaneously to his elevated senses.

"As you notice," said Satan "your popularity has had some fascinating side effects. In particular, a pretty good proportion of psychotics, sometime in their illness, think that they're you. I don't think either of us wants to sit here counting them all, but could we agree on a hundred thousand as a conservative estimate?"

"A hundred thousand psychotics who believe themselves to be Jesus Christ, across the entire scope of world history," agreed Jesus. "Sounds reasonable."

"And it's a pretty strong delusion," the Devil went on. "They'd dismiss the contention that they're not you with barely a second thought. Whatever their reasoning processes are, they seem to be bent in on themselves somehow so that they always affirm the conclusion."

"It's very sad," Jesus said. "I hope my Father in Heaven will have mercy upon them."

"That's not what we're here to talk about," said the Devil. "What I'm really interested in is this - given a randomly chosen person who's absolutely certain he's Jesus, what's the probability that he is, in fact, Jesus?"

"Well," Jesus answered "There are a hundred thousand psychotics who believe themselves to be Jesus, and only one real Jesus. So by Bayes' Theorem, we calculate that believing one's self to be Jesus gives one only about a one in one hundred thousand chance that one is actually Jesus."

"Your reasoning is impeccable," said Satan. "So, what is the probability that you're actually Jesus?"

"What?" asked Jesus.

"You are an individual with a certain amount of evidence that you are Jesus. Specifically, you believe yourself to be him. You have various experiences which your reason tells you are consistent with being Jesus, like memories of your mother Mary and so on, but these seem like the sort of thing a damaged intellect could create to support a delusion. You previously determined that a randomly selected person with the belief that he is Jesus has a 1/100,000 chance of being Jesus and a 99,999/100,000 chance of being a psychotic. So, Mr. Person With The Belief That He Is Jesus, do you think those numbers apply to you?"

Jesus thought for a moment. "I'm not a psychotic," he said. "I think I would know if I were psychotic. I'd have all sorts of symptoms. Hallucinations. Confusion."

"You know what the number one hallucination reported by psychotic patients is?" Satan asked.

Jesus thought for a moment. "What?"

"The Devil," said the Devil.

"Oh, that's just unfair," Jesus told him.

"Usually they report he's trying to tempt them to do self-destructive things. You know, like jump off tall buildings. Remind me what we were doing earlier today?"

"You set that up to confuse me," said Jesus.

"And you mentioned confusion. Tell me, where are we right now?"

"An exceedingly high mountain," Jesus answered.

"Which one, exactly? Because the tallest mountain in Israel is a bit under four thousand feet. That's hardly see-all-the-kingdoms-of-the-world height. Are you even sure what country we're in right now? And, uh, last time I checked I'm almost certain the world was a sphere. So what particular mountain do you think we're on that allows us to see all the kingdoms of the world?"

"Uh, well, there are no kingdoms in the Western Hemisphere at this point in history..." suggested Jesus.

"Wrong!" said Satan. "Zapotecs and Mochica! You don't know where you are, you don't know how you got here, and you don't know how you're seeing what you're seeing."

"You took me here," Jesus countered. "I assume you used some sort of devil-magic or something. I didn't watch where we were going."

"Oh please," said Satan. "Outside View! In general, when someone says the only reason they don't know what country they're in is because the Devil is magically clouding their mind, does that make them more or less likely to be mentally ill?"

"Mrhghn," grumbled Jesus.

"So let's recap. You believe yourself to be Jesus. You admit that you have been seeing the Devil, and that he commands you to jump off buildings, a command you resist only with great difficulty. You don't know where you are or how you got there, and your only weak explanation is that malevolent demons magically transported you there and meddled with your mind so you don't remember it. Using the Outside View, what is the probability that you are even remotely sane?"

"Look," said Jesus. "Could you just tell me what the temptation is already?"

Satan waved his hand, and a syringe materialized within it. "5 mg haloperidol, IM" he told him.

Jesus looked at the Devil. He looked at the syringe. He looked at All The Kingdoms Of The World. He looked back at the Devil. His brow furrowed in thought. He looked at the syringe again.

Then his eyes shone as the Holy Spirit flowed through him. His indecision vanished. "Your lies have no power over me, demon," he told his tormentor.

"Please calm down," said Satan, only now he spoke with the voice of a middle-aged woman. "We're just trying to help you, Mr. Anderson. Please just hold still and let me give you your medication."

"Get thee behind me, Satan!" shouted the Christ, and he pushed the Devil off the mountain. Satan screamed as he plummeted, screamed with a woman's voice, until he vanished from sight in the depths below.

Mr. Anderson

This crumb, a possibly nice little Matrix reference, that slightly allows an interpretation of the text that it really is Christ confronting Satan, is why I still treasure Scott's fiction.

Oh, even if it wasn't real Christ, "Christ" did absolutely the right thing here by rejecting the Devil. If everyone follows that reasoning and accepts that they are crazy it means the real Christ also gets caught up by it. Imagine Christ giving in to the Devil in exchange for 100k fewer psychotics across all of human history causing minor disruptions that are forgotten years after they die at the latest. Humanity would be in a very different place today.

Banger, do you have the link to the original post?

https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/3u39yg/a_collection_of_scott_alexanders_literary_works/

This one is The Last Temptation of Christ.

Trump is a narcissist with a god complex.

This is undeniable. He's been slapping his name and face on any national icon he can and is presently in the process of trying to make the nation's 250th anniversary a massive ego trip.

A better question is what is it about Trump that makes so many of his supporters abandon their supposed values (Christian morality, patriotism, etc...) to not only excuse but effusively support him in a way that utterly surpasses normal partisan affiliation.

Are you asking a question or pretending to ask the question to boo the outgroup?

If you do ask the question, then the answer is they do not consider supporting Trump to be incompatible with patriotism, etc... and while Trump is not exactly an exemplary Christian (especially in his private life), his policies align much more with those that people who hold these values (and many other people who hold similar values while not being Christians) would endorse than the alternatives.

Not sure what you mean by "utterly surpasses normal partisan affiliation" - we know that it is normal for partisans to excuse their team for lying, cheating, fraud, racism, corruption, ignorance, being mentally deficient, being senile, and so on, while on the other hand, it is normal to compare their favorites to saints, gods, Jesus Christ and other spiritual figures. What part of Trump support surpasses that?

A better question is what is it about Trump that makes so many of his supporters abandon their supposed values (Christian morality, patriotism, etc...) to not only excuse but effusively support him in a way that utterly surpasses normal partisan affiliation.

Policies they like, or at least they can live with, compared to those of the other guy.

That would explain grudging support, whereas Trump's supporters are anything but grudging despite his negative VORP on substantive issues.

Most of the issue isn't value over replacement on substantive issues, it is value over replacement on beating Democrats.

MAGA supporters are right that Trump is more electable than a Goldman-Aramco Republican who wants to cut Social Security and Medicare and let another million H1Bs in, but I suspect they are wrong that he is more electable than a more competent, less divisive populist Republican like DeSantis.

but I suspect they are wrong that he is more electable than a more competent, less divisive populist Republican like DeSantis

I'm not sure DeSantis is better. I personally like him more, and would be glad to see him in the White House, but Trump is a much better showman and that counts for a lot in politics. I wish it didn't but it does.

  1. This post was not popular among Trump's supporters

  2. Trump's supporters are only about 40-50% religious, although nearly all of them are cultural Christians.

It explains both grudging support -- in those who feel the politicians they support following their values is very important -- and enthusiastic support -- in those who do not. Negative VORP on issues is obviously something they do not believe (certainly I do not).

I care exactly as much as I would if it were Vishnu or Amaterasu.

(Well, okay - it would be funnier if he were also cross-dressing.)

I guess Trump is the best exemplification of the "from my point of view the jedi are evil". I already don't like the church as an institution, nor the way it concerns itself with third worldism nor it's followers blank slatist tendencies. So to me Trump turbo blaspheming isn't that shocking or offputting, yeah it's crass and egomaniacal but I kinda like that quality about him.

Any Trump supporters care to steelman this?

It's funny and not that big a deal. An AI generated image like that of Lebron or Vic Fangio would be a perfectly normal thing on sports twitter.

I'm surprised people are making such a big deal of this. In the WSJ Doug Wilson said it was blasphemous, while Rod Dreher said that while Trump might not be the The Antichrist he was engaged in Acts of Antichrist type vibes.

To me, the most parsimonious explanation is that Trump is a narcissist with a god complex.

Nope, the most parsimonious explanation is that Trump is a giant troll with a juvenile sense of humor. He loves his own jokes and outlandish boasts. Sometimes others do not. I also have an impression he's not that devout Christian - I mean, he's probably in line with most of Christian morality, but he's not that deeply spiritual, so he may just have not appreciated how this would land with more serious Christians.

That's not to say Trump isn't a huge narcissist - he absolutely is (about 90% of top politicians are, many in much deeper and totally humorless way). But it's very unlikely he considers himself literally to be God or any other kind of supernatural being.

he's probably in line with most of Christian morality

apart from the bits about sexual morality, bearing false witness against neighbours, dealing honorably with social inferiors etc. (The Bible explicitly condemns stiffing workers, something Trump thinks is just obvious business savvy).

So basically he isn't in line with Christian morality.

I agree with you that while Trump is a huge narcissist, he doesn't think he is God. A worrying number of his core supporters think he is a Godlike figure (I remember Trump as the W40K Emperor being a popular meme back in 2016), and Trump is delighted to humour them.

A worrying number of his core supporters think he is a Godlike figure

That's an exaggeration too. Sure, they do the memes, that's what people do on the Internet. Pretty much none of them actually things he is a supernatural being worthy of worship. In fact, we'd find more worship of, say, Obama (who had been unironically called names like Lightworker and his supporters described feelings that can be characterized as religious ecstasy upon meeting him) than Trump. But even then it didn't raise to truly "Godlike" proportions. Sure, adoring people is as common (visit any pop music concert, or just look at the ticket prices) as it is un-Christian, but that's what happens. But it rarely goes as far and deep as true religious conviction. And of course, claiming this is a phenomenon somehow unique or special to Trump only reveals either ignorance or blind partisanship.

Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

It’s not impossible to have a civil discussion about this brand of drama, but you’re not going to get it by coming in guns blazing.

To be honest, I was just interested in what the forum had to say on this. My own comments were perfunctory, made solely to avoid falling afoul of the low-effort rule. I didn't really have anything to add. Was there a better way to do this?

If the image had been satirical, people would have dismissed it as too over the top.

It is satirical. It is over the top. Nobody “cares”. Your mom or grandma might disapprove but the only people taking this seriously are people who want to be mad at Trump. That includes a lot of Catholic and conservafluencers who feel embarrassed by the idea that religion codes right, so this gives them the perfect excuse.

To me, the most parsimonious explanation is that Trump is a narcissist with a god complex.

You say this as though this isn’t totally compatible with being a Trump supporter.

Any Trump supporters care to steelman this?

A disappointingly large percentage of the population really really likes to make AI slop images of themselves, and unfortunately, also post those images on the internet. Remember when the whole ghiblification craze happened? It never ended, and has only gotten worse as ai models have gotten better.

Unfortunately Trump is one of those people. I wouldn't read into it any more than just absolutely awful taste.

I myself am not completely immune to this, but at least I have the awareness to tell that nobody else wants to see this slop.

I am a bit confused about it. I made about three images, they were cute, they were better than a Photoshop filter from 2005, but then what? I didn't want to print them or anything?

I heard Anthony Scaramucci on his podcast give the theory that Trump would have posted the image (and done all the other recent catholic-baiting posts) in order to own JD Vance and maybe Rubio as well, who as the most prominent catholics in his cabinet will be obliged to defend Trump instead of their own religion. I can see how putting them in that demeaning position would satisfy Trump, don't know if it's really plausible though.

My own take would be that pushing the boundaries further and further to gauge pushback and keep going whenever there's not much resistance is just what he does. If people had liked these images he'd have been able to go full 'I am your God' cult leader, but sadly he didn't get a warm enough response.

the most parsimonious explanation is that Trump is a narcissist with a god complex

I'm a big Trump supporter. I concede that he has narcissistic tendencies although I don't know if he is diagnosible with anything. I would guess that the experience of being shot and completely avoiding serious harm due to fortuitous circumstances would exacerbate these tendencies in most people.

Anyway, I think it's pretty common for successful politicians to have personalities which lean towards the so-called "dark-triad" of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and sociopathy. Bill Clinton struck me as being at least somewhat sociopathic.

So my defense of Donald Trump is that sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good. At the moment, there is a huge threat to the United States from Leftism, Progressivism, Wokeism, whatever you want to call it. The sort of people who hate America, hate white people, hate men, etc. The sort of people who will seize on any excuse to seriously oppress their perceived enemies. The sort of people who seriously think it's a good idea to put confused children through sex-change procedures. Donald Trump, generally speaking, opposes all that.

In my view the same character aspects that make Trump a gauche, offensive, tone-deaf goof are what allow him to say "I'm gonna bomb the shit out of them," "Grab em by the pussy," and on and on up to the repost of himself as a healing messiah-- but also to stand up defiantly to the crowd who is saying the (naked) Emperor's new clothes are fine and beautiful. He can and does reject out loud many of the progressive left points of faith, with no apologies. Whether he does this because he's old and isn't interested in adapting, is simply preaching to what sees as his support group, or has thought it all through, Motte-Style, and reached his own conclusions, I cannot say.

In usual terms we would say "He has no filter." Which in many, many cases is refreshing and admirable. His standing against transgender ideologues is probably the one issue I really have to respect him for (if respect is the right word). He has walked a more ambiguous line on race issues, but certainly doesn't mouth the pat opporessor and oppressed line of most of his antagonists. Etc.

I would normally say it took great courage in a politician to be so contrary so publicly, but he isn't really a politician in the sense I use the term, and I'm not sure courage is the right word (maybe fearlessness).

As for narcissism, let's remember it's just a word a bunch of "mental health professionals" agreed on how to define. He's definitely full of himself in an almost pampered child way, though he also has a resilience and toughness that allow him to withstand repeated verbal assaults on his character by everyone from the NYT to mainstream comedians to any rando who wants an easy butt to his joke, jibes about his appearance that would be deemed hateful if directed at anyone else, and at least one fast-moving bullet. This would have mentally crushed any normal (sane, if you like) person years ago. I hesitate to say anyone is one-of-a-kind but he's certainly close.

I am not a Trump supporter, but I suppose I should weigh in with another Christian response -

This is obviously gross, blasphemous, and testament to Trump's narcissism, and in that light I think it tells us nothing we did not already know. We already knew that Trump cares absolutely nothing for God, Jesus, or any sense of human dignity. We already knew that he holds nothing sacred. He has been very clear about that. We also know that he is prone to like or retweet anything that flatters him, no matter how lacking in taste. This is of the same species as that AI-generated video of Trump in a jet dropping excrement on protesters. If it flatters Trump, he likes it, and because he has no sense of decorum about anything, he just shares it.

This reveals that Trump is venal, crass, self-centered, and so on, but again we all knew that. This does not tell me anything new. Maybe that Trump has a kind of contempt for all that I hold sacred, but that too I already knew.

Yes, it is vile, and the more people realise the extent to which Trump is a man wholly lacking in virtue, the better, but for me personally? It moves me not a jot.

(Assuming you're American) - Did you vote for Kamala? Just curious.

I'm Australian. I was spared that choice.

It really is incredible that neither US party could put forth a decent candidate. Unbelievable neglect of the world's greatest power.

Presidential candidates being thoroughly mediocre is pretty normal. There just aren't that many brilliant leaders out there, and in the US presidential system you're praying for the trifecta of: able to win a partisan primary, able to win a nationwide general election, and actually a competent executive. There is some overlap between the first two with respect to charisma, but they're mostly three distinct skill/capability sets.

However, it must be noted that 2024 didn't fit the pattern of people grudgingly voting for their party's nominee. Trump voters did not regard him as the best option amongst a subpar selection. They were (and for the most part still are) rapturously enthusiastic about him.

I don't it's mediocrity that is the issue here.

Isn't this combining two groups?

Trump does have a base that is rapturously enthusiastic for him - which people often call the MAGA base or MAGA crowd. But this group is not coterminous with those people who voted for Trump. He did not win 2024 with his base alone - and we can see now that even though Trump won the popular vote, his current approval ratings are far lower than that. It seems like there must have been a lot of people who voted for Trump but are not consistently enthusiastic about him.

Isn't this combining two groups?

Not really. There are some marginal voters who voted for Trump but don't like him, but the vast bulk of Trump's ~~77.5m votes in 2024 came from Republicans. Amongst Republicans he is still incredibly popular, both in terms of raw approval and in terms of the fervency with which he is supported. The MAGA base has essentially devoured the rest of the Republican Party.

The fact that the Republican candidate was mostly voted for by Republicans is surely to be expected irrespective of who the candidate is. Republicans vote for Republican candidates. But not all of those were genuinely enthusiastic about Trump, and of course, Trump won on the back of swing voters.

The initial question here was about Trump voters. I think there are at least three different groups under discussion here: 1) everybody who voted for Trump, 2) Republicans, 3) MAGA. There is substantial overlap between those groups, obviously, but as far as I can tell there are plenty of people in one group but not in one or both of the others.

It looks to me like Trump's approval among Republicans was mostly in the 80s while in office, dipped significantly while he was out of office, and is dipping again due to Iran.

More comments

Very much agreed. Trump got about 40% of the 2016 Republican primary vote if you only look at states which voted while the race was still competitive. Cruz voters don't need to hold their nose to vote for Trump, but I don't think they are any happier with him than they would be with another winning Republican who appointed pro-life SCOTUS justices.

You have to understand the context here. Republicans tried the nice guys for years. Romney was nice. McCain was nice. Even Bush was way nicer than Trump. What they learned from that? First: your nice guy will be declared literally Hitler anyway. There's no avoiding it, that's just how it works. Second: nice guys finish last. Cruz or Rubio wouldn't likely beat Clinton. To say nothing of Jeb!. Trump did.

I suppose I could be accused of dodging the question, so I should try to expand a little.

One of my red lines is that I will not vote for an unrepentant adulterer. Credible repentance and apology is needed before I will even consider it. Technically both Trump and Harris fail that criterion, though in Harris' case it's because, while single, she had an affair with a married-but-separated man. In general I feel that if you cannot keep faith in your personal life, you cannot keep faith in your political life. So even before we get into any other character issues, I could not vote for Trump.

The steelman of the case for Trump, to me, goes something like, "Yes, I know he is of terrible personal character, and that does weigh in my considerations, but a political choice like this has to be a kind of calculation about what's best for the country, and a bad man might nonetheless be the least bad choice for the country. It is a betrayal of the virtue of charity, and your obligations to your fellow citizens, to refuse to vote for a least-bad candidate for character reasons, because if the worse candidate wins, it is your fellow citizens who will suffer a worse result." A Trump voter aiming to persuade me would probably do best by not trying to play down or distract from the awfulness of his character, as revealed by things like these tweets, but rather by trying to direct me to concrete policy results.

For the first Trump term, I think they might have a strong case on consequentialist grounds like that. For the second term, it would be weaker. Would Harris have bungled the Middle East as badly as Trump seems to be? I can't prove a counterfactual, but I'm skeptical.

Still, if we're going to talk consequences, I would argue, I suppose, that the signalling value of a write-in or absent vote is more than zero, and perhaps a statement of lack of faith in the American political system, or of disgust at both candidates, would have about as much value as a single vote ever could.

I never actually faced this calculation, thankfully, but if I had been in the US, I suspect I would have left the vote for president blank or done a write-in, while still voting down-ballot.

By adultery, do you mean cheating (even if only technically, given that the man Kamala was with was separated), or does it include any form of extramarital sex?

I think that if you're trying to nitpick whether or not what you did was really adulterous, you're probably already in the red zone.

The underlying principle is that people who either don't keep their own most sacred promises, or who participate in helping others to break their own most sacred promises, should not bear the public trust. This is why e.g. someone who cheats in a same-sex partnership still fails the test, even though technically that's not 'marriage' in the sense that I understand the term.

You might be implying cases like a married couple who, via mutual agreement, sleep with other people? Like an open marriage? That does run afoul of my rule; I see how it's meaningfully different to traditional cheating, but it's still in my view morally disqualifying. This is also how I resolve cases of consensual polyamory - the interaction with my adultery rule is somewhat blurry, but as it is also disqualifying in itself, there is no need to resolve the exact relationship to adultery.

This is all just around the edges, though. Practical cases tend to look more like, for example, Barnaby Joyce.

Oops, I was confusing adultery with fornication. My confusion stemmed from "thou shalt not commit adultery" commonly being interpreted as also prohibiting fornication. I was actually asking about your opinion on non-adulterous extramarital sex.

I think that if you're trying to nitpick whether or not what you did was really adulterous, you're probably already in the red zone.

I don't think that should necessarily apply to politicians. Politicians have enemies who interpret everything they did uncharitably, so a politician may have to "nitpick" in response to them.

Trump's ability to unite a wide coalition during the election was one of his great strengths. He got mainstream republicans, right wing populists, religious people, silicon valley tech bros and others to join his coalition.

In the last few months he seems to have swung in the polar opposite direction by doing his best to alienate as many groups as possible. Tucker is low IQ, Candace is ugly, the pope is weak, Elon Musk is crazy. Trump as Jesus upsets Christians. In foreign policy he has done his best to sour relations with as many countries as possible. Trump seems to have become a complete megalomaniac who lashes out at anyone who isn't worshipping him. His coalition is going to fall apart.

His coalition is going to fall apart.

That's what they said when he went after the Gold Star family. And on many other occasions, I believe. I predict ol' Donny's going to wiggle his way out of this one effortlessly.

As someone from the left, watching Trump voters has often felt like watching someone meet their idol, seeing said idol punch them in the face, and then the fan explains to onlookers that it was just a friendly greeting.

Iran has thus far felt that if anything can end MAGA's love affair with Trump, it's watching "no new wars" fall apart. And that has certainly had some impact, but the Teflon still hasn't completely come off yet. As for all the "little things" up to and including blasphemy, I've long given up on the idea of the camel's back being broken no matter how much straw is added to it.

The Iran war is a risk, but as long as Trump doesn't lose or get into a nasty quagmire, he can get wiggle out of that one too.

Yeah, it's worth remembering what it felt like being inside the Trump bubble, for those who seem to have fallen out.

On a side note, to the extent that people have been falling out, I'm not sure that will matter much. Post-Trump GOP will be an interesting thing to see. And hopefully not completely disappointing, though that is probably a safe bet.

Any Trump supporters care to steelman this? To me, the most parsimonious explanation is that Trump is a narcissist with a god complex.

Boomer posts cringe on social media, news at eleven!

His strategizing on social media has just been bad. There’s no excuse. The sort of mistakes that would take a normal person hours to devise on purpose in a room with high ceilings. “Criticize the Pope while the cultural moment has conservative influencers drifting to Catholicism… now depict yourself as Jesus. Make sure to put a demon figure in the background”. “Write the first presidential Alhamdulilah… on Easter. Then don’t write another tweet for Easter. Then post another Alhamdulillah a few days later”. “Call for civilizational destruction, to remove America from the moral high ground. Post it widely so military service members know to refuse your orders”.

There is no 4d chess happening behind the scenes. These mistakes are in his area of mastery, which was messaging and reading the room. I assume the mistakes he’s making with the war and negotiations are even worse.

You linked to the Truman Show?

As in, he’s not Ed Harris in the Truman Show manipulating the reality around us with control and insight behind the curtains. (There was a funny meme going around of Trump getting orders from Ed Harrison, but unfortunately I can’t find it again)

There was a Manifold market: “Will Donald Trump tweet an image of himself as Jesus Christ?” Resolved yes

I just don’t understand this one. The democrats have never cared about “blasphemy” in any form, in fact they quite often (especially with regard to Christianity) celebrate “transgressive” art that is often by it’s nature blasphemy against Christianity. The democrats defended the film “Last Temptation of Christ” that depicted Christ as struggling with homosexuality, they defended an art display that was literally a crucifix in a jar of urine. This only makes sense if the people using this incident are doing a pretty classic KTO-KEGO. If this were anyone other than Trump, no one would be talking about it.

The democrats have never cared about “blasphemy” in any form

Of course not and they still don't, this is all arguments-as-soldiers. They couldn't possibly care less but it's a "fun" excuse to get Trump's supporters to complain about him.

The democrats defended the film “Last Temptation of Christ” that depicted Christ as struggling with homosexuality

Possibly thinking of the play Corpus Christi or one of the other works. I could've sworn there was another movie by an Italian director but I can't find it on wikipedia.

Kto indeed. You are conflating several different groups.

The presidential twitter has more reach than any shock artist. I think you’ll find that most of the people complaining never said anything about Piss Christ at all.

I think you're using the label "Democrats" to mean "literally anyone I dislike or disagree with".

The democrats defended the film “Last Temptation of Christ” that depicted Christ as struggling with homosexuality

Were Democrats (members of the Democratic party, people involved in fundraising for the party, etc.) defending the film, or just generally left-wing or progressive people? Are the defenders representative of the Democratic party?

they defended an art display that was literally a crucifix in a jar of urine.

This one is peculiar in that:

Serrano [the artist] said of the controversy: "I had no idea Piss Christ would get the attention it did, since I meant neither blasphemy nor offense by it. I've been a Catholic all my life, so I am a follower of Christ." (...)

On June 23, 2023, Andres Serrano was included among a group of artists invited to meet with Pope Francis in the Sistine Chapel as part of an effort to "broaden out the engagement of the church with artists" and to proclaim the church's commitment to supporting art that serves "to waken us up, call us to a new alertness and a new consciousness" about issues of social justice.[26] During this meeting, the pope blessed Serrano and gave him a thumbs up gesture of approval. Serrano remarked, "I was very happy that the church understands that I am a Christian artist and I am not a blasphemous artist. I’m just an artist."

Is the Pope Catholic Christian?

According to a 2025 poll, 62% of US adults described themselves as Christians. This percentage used to be even higher in the past – you know, when the Democratic party won majorities in elections. A very large proportion of Democratic party voters identify as Christians.

KTO-KEGO

"Who whom" in Polish with the latter misspelled? Do I have this right?

Is the Pope Christian?

The problem with the pope (pick any of the latest ones) is they don't believe in shotgun jesus. When any given statement from the pope could be identical to an internationalist SJ wokie with the numbers filed off it makes me despise everything they stand for.

Your objection is that they're not American nationalists? Do you know what the word "catholic" means?

And I doubt any "internationalist SJ wokie" would agree with their (very strongly held) stance on abortion.

I had no idea Piss Christ would get the attention it did, since I meant neither blasphemy nor offense by it. I've been a Catholic all my life, so I am a follower of Christ.

Sometimes people here act autistically in all sincerity. I don't believe that Serrano was. Nobody with the least bit of awareness of other people could fail to know that the most obvious interpretation of Jesus in urine is disdain for Jesus, and that it will predictably be seen as saying exactly that. Insisting that that isn't what he meant is a form of trolling. It's like saying "fuck you" and explaining that you merely wished that someone engage in a consensual, pleasurable, act, and why would anyone object to that?

Were Democrats (members of the Democratic party, people involved in fundraising for the party, etc.) defending the film, or just generally left-wing or progressive people? Are the defenders representative of the Democratic party?

Were the people 'defending' the film saying "It is good that it exists.", or were they saying "You don't get to demand that it not exist."?

Nitpick: it's "kto kogo"

Further nitpick: despite that being how it’s written in Cyrillic, in modern Russian it is pronounced something like “kto kavo”

The democrats have never cared about “blasphemy” in any form, in fact they quite often (especially with regard to Christianity) celebrate “transgressive” art that is often by it’s nature blasphemy against Christianity.

"Blasphemy"'s a wide category and is not amazingly helpful toward understanding this.

SJers generally celebrate things that denigrate or subvert Christianity, like the aforementioned Piss Christ and like depicting Jesus as black. Arrogantly claiming to be Jesus (at least without obvious subversion as well) implies that being Jesus is a good thing, which is not in accord with the SJ narrative. It's not the worst thing in the world by their standards, but AIUI they generally consider it negative from an ideological point of view.

Well, I don't think that's wrong, but it's not something many people on the left will publically say and I think it's fair to criticize public positions as real, even if they are not. Piss Christ isn't officially blasphemous. It's not saying anything bad about Jesus; it's about how people have treated Jesus badly.

No, it's not. It's only purpose was to antagonize Christians, and that story was invented for gaslighting purposes.

There is nothing wrong with depicting Jesus as black; outside of the art of iconography(which has very specific conventions and rules), His appearance is completely arbitrary.

Depicting Him as George Floyd is idolatrous, blasphemous, and heretical, sure. But if African Americans prefer 'black Jesus' then that's fine, whatever. He probably wasn't blond either.

Is blond Jesus common? I mean, I can think of one blond Jesus depiction off the top of my head, sure, but it's the painting by Adolf Hitler and one must assume that's a bit unrepresentative.

I've seen a few, all from regions of the world with lots of blonds.

If this were anyone other than Trump, no one would be talking about it.

If Trump weren't president of the United States no one would be talking about it.

It is certainly no patch on on dijonghazi or tan suitgate, but you expect a certain amount of decorum from your senior leaders that you don't demand from other people. Especially when it comes to mocking your own supporters by substituting yourself for Jesus.

Seems like those making blasphemy allegations are right leaning, or at least strongly Christian.

The democrats reaction more likely stems from the fact that this is a pretty strong instantiation of the idea that Trump has a savior complex and that ‘MAGA is a cult’. Add in the self-own of the leader of the Christian right committing blasphemy, and it makes sense why this is notable.

If this were anyone other than Trump, nobody would be talking about it.

Trump is the president, it’s more notable when he does unusual things. I think it’s safe to say it would have been national news if Biden(‘s staff) or Obama posted a picture of themselves as Jesus.

Also, not to nitpick, but Piss Christ and Passion of the Christ are from 1987 and 1988 respectively. I doubt most democrat (or republican) voters know what Piss Christ is, and probably more than a few have never seen the movie. Just seems odd to call this out as evidence of the democrats ongoing support of blasphemy.

If this were anyone other than Trump, no one would be talking about it.

Really? You sincerely think if another politician posted an image of himself as Jesus Christ no one would be talking about it? My priors on that are very different, to put it mildly.

Obviously democrats don’t care about “blasphemy” (for Christians at any rate), but the only people complaining about it being “blasphemous” that I’ve seen have been Christian sources, most of which are right-leaning. Democrat criticism appears to be on the grounds of delusional narcissism, tastelessness, and/or simple pointing and laughing.

A lot of those who are very upset about it, me included, are not democrats.

The Last Temptation of Christ did not depict Jesus struggling with homosexuality. The book itself was deeply spiritual and I personally found it incredibly moving.

The film was not bad either and had a great soundtrack by Peter Gabriel.

The temptation of the title was a sort of alternate reality where he wed Mary Magdalene after having been deceived by Satan. I recommend the book in particular.

This does not speak to your point but I wanted to make the correction for the sake of accuracy.

Edit: He does not remain in the alternate reality.

I think Trump genuinely doesn't understand the least bit of Christianity. This is not to defend or excuse him. By itself a statement like, "The US President doesn't understand the least bit of Christianity," would have been a horrible insult just a few decades ago. Welcome to the new USA.

It's just like if someone from Japan shared a AI-Generated image of them being Jesus without realizing what they were depicting. Neon Genesis Evangelion gets away with using Christianity as an aesthetic, because it looks exotic and cool. Trump did something similar. I'm about as offended by one as I am by the other. I don't think it indicates a God Complex anymore than Hideaki Anno has shown himself to have a God Complex.

Well, not AI, but now since you mentioned it.

/images/17761989090854647.webp

Neon Genesis Evangelion gets away with using Christianity as an aesthetic, because it looks exotic and cool.

I will say that, while true in a sense, I understand this line to be a common overcorrection. Evangelion's Christian (and Judaic) imagery didn't come from some deep place of spiritual belief, but it wasn't really a careless choice made out of blissful ignorance, either. The Japanese, too, have libraries and the ability to research things, and our religion has had more of a historic impact on them than vice versa. It's sort of akin to a Hollywood movie that incorporates a lot of references to Buddhism - the filmmakers may not have been Buddhists themselves, but at some point it's clear that they did the reading.

This is my default explanation for anything that Trump does. The last decade has proven to me that he's unthinking and uncaring at the best of times, and the last 2 years has made me believe that he's entered a stage in his life that aren't the best times. Also, I think that the conclusion that he's a narcissist with a god complex is pretty easy to reach independent of this, and trying to claim that this post adds meaningful evidence of this seems rather silly. I'm reminded of around mid-late 2024, when some media outlet presented the argument that Trump was fascist/Nazi/Hitler-like (I don't recall exactly which), and a bunch of people were breathlessly pointing at the argument as some novel point that should convince former Trump voters, as if calling him giga-Hitler hadn't just been SOP for his loudest opponents continually since 2015.

Neon Genesis Evangelion gets away with using Christianity as an aesthetic, because it looks exotic and cool. Trump did something similar.

Why do we live in the reality where Trump is appropriating Christian iconography instead of Evangelion? Trump making an illustration of himself in one of those skintight fan service suits would have broken open at least three of the seals.

NSFW: https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/10537472

A more hilarious image would be Trump as Senator Armstrong, replete with "nanomachines" and lewdly overdetailed arm/torso muscles.

Trump would totally be Gendo. He became president as part of a larger plot to reunite with his dead brother, but first he needs to support Israel and wipe Iran off the map in order to fulfill a prophecy from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Get in the fucking bomber, Barron!

(Who would make a better Miasto, Kristi Noem or Tulsi Gabbard? Kristi is hotter, but Tulsi has actual military experience.)

Definitely Tulsi Gabbard. In that leather jacket, hoo boy.

Any Trump supporters care to steelman this?

I don't like it, and I'm disgusted by it, but he's still a better pick than Kamala or anyone else the Dems have (or theoretically might) put forward as a candidate on any and all issues I care about. So yeah, the Dems are still so awful that Trump can blaspheme Christ and he's still better than the opposition ("Hey Jamie, pull up that clip of God being booed at the DNC").

Trump doesn't support the mass importation of Muslims and Hindus, though he definitely is only doing token opposition to things like H1B visas where it would really make a dent in stopping them. And yet I can't imagine the Dems doing anything other than increasing the amount of Muslims and Indians coming in.

So yeah, Trump is far from perfect, but he still manages to better serve my interests as both a Christian and an American than the opposition.

The counterpoint is that it's not just "Trump vs a Dem." The more reasonable expectation is that the Republican primary is where Republicans would be expected to offer better options to a right-leaning voter. Trump won that by a mile.

The Republicans have been putting forward milquetoast RINOs for decades, and I (and most Republicans, though for the record I'm not a Republican I'm a member of the Constitution Party) grew tired enough of it that they didn't trust any establishment candidate the GOP put forward.

But once the shape of the 2016 primary became clear, Trump was running against Cruz, so "I want a real Republican and not a RINO" doesn't point to a Trump vote.

I know a lot of people who thought that way did vote for Trump over Cruz, and it sounds like you were one of them. I would be interested to hear what the logic is - was it simply that Trump was hated by the GOPe even more than Cruz was, or was it a specific policy or issue? (The small number of non-Mormon conservative Americans I know all voted for Cruz, although they thought of it as a 2 good options scenario rather than holding their noses and voting for the lesser evil).

I would think a lot of them probably thought that since all the RINOs lined up behind Cruz once it became clear that Jeb, Rubio and Kasich were not gonna beat Trump, that a Cruz administration would just become RINO central, even if that's not what it would have been in a counterfactual world where Trump didn't run and Cruz beat Jeb, Rubio and Kasich.

Did the RINOs line up behind Cruz? My memory is that Kasich went the distance until it was mathematically impossible to beat Trump and the RINOs supported him in doing so.

I just checked and yeah, Kasich dropped right after Cruz, but his campaign was very dead way ahead of that, with Cruz being the last credible obstacle to Trump's nomination. The reporting at the time was indeed that the establishment had lined up behind Cruz. Bush and Rubio endorsed Cruz.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/23/ted-cruz-is-the-republican-establishment-candidate-thats-absolutely-insane/

I don't think the counterfactual Cruz that won without Trump being in the mix would have been a bad president (if he had any chance in the general, which I doubt), but a Cruz that won the nomination as the GOPe's last stand against Trump would have had a different mandate.

Thanks. The UK media had lost interest at some point before then once it was clear to anyone who wasn't wishcasting that Trump would win.

Yeah, but other Republican candidates weren't necessarily better than Kamala, or were perceived as worse than Trump at winning the general election. There's tonnes of these kind of strategic concerns people have when making their choice. Everybody knows this when they're talking about their own side (why do you think the Dems picked a shambling corpse for a candidate that they later had to eject in the las minute?), but conveniently forgets it when talking about their enemies.

Obviously this is low-effort, boo-outgroup, and a particularly lazy case of "arguing with the forum", so I'll be brief: there's a long tradition of people making hilariously hagiographic pictures of politicians they like. Think Boomer facebook. Trump seems to have no filter on retweeting/retruthing these things - the most recent 'controversy' iirc was a video of him dumping manure on a No Kings protest - so he saw this, liked it, and retruthed it (or someone on his team did, where it gets weird is that someone apparently ran the image through another AI to recreate it, which is what added the odd symmetrical Statue of Liberty silhouette, and I'm sure that Trump isn't mucking around with ChatGPT).

If you are looking for evidence that Donald Trump is a narcissist - I know, it's a shocking and contrarian thesis to suggest, but we can explore even the wildest ideas here - I'd recommend starting with the giant gold tower with his name on the front.

Really, really cringe things that associate elements of the American civic religion with Christianity are pretty dime-a-dozen in red tribe art, such as the most hilarious painting of all time: Jesus holding the Constitution of the United States while a Supreme Court Justice weeps.

It's exceptionally gauche to make such a piece of artwork of a living politician, but I'm sure it happens on the left too from time to time. That people invest this kind of hope in politicians is pretty ridiculous to me, but they do, and silly stuff like this results.

I think most people have generated a "what would I look like as a medieval X/what would Y look like as a Christian saint" image using AI, it's a fairly common pastime. Sharing it on social media is pretty ridiculous though.

Trump is pretty narcissistic, and this may be a symptom of that, but it's far from the most insane thing he's ever done and at this point the truth is that his supporters' support for him is something that's not amenable to anything that actually happens, and the hope that many on the left/center have that some scandal will destroy his popularity among his base just isn't going to happen. Even the Christians who were outraged by this still "back the mission."

That's a great painting. Yes, it's a very Red-coded thing, partially because it's so boomerish - the big exception for the Left being Obama, who was also beloved of his tribe's boomers.

I also doubt that more than a lizardman-constant % of the people reacting are genuinely offended Christians who loved Trump until this outrage. It's just social media being social media.

The Democratic Party is working hard to give MAGA the mid-terms despite everything.

The US House of Representatives on Thursday narrowly rejected a war powers resolution that would have prevented further military action against Iran, as Democrats united against continued US involvement in the conflict amid peace talks that have yet to make a breakthrough.

Apparently, the resolution failed by two votes. However, my understanding is that this would have been largely symbolic, as a bill would require both the House and the Senate to vote in its favor, and actually require 2/3 majorities to override the presidential veto which can be taken as granted.

Strategically speaking, preventing Trump from continuing his war seems like a classic case of interrupting your opponent while he is making a mistake. It seems clear that MAGA is searching for an off-ramp whose taking they can sell as a win. But the next best thing to a win is a scapegoat. If Congress stops Trump from bombing Iran, Trump will surely claim that his strategy was going great and Iran was just about to surrender unconditionally when he was stabbed in the back by the radical leftists. Half the country will end up believing that sure, Trump's war raised the gas prices for a while but it was the Democrats who made sure it was all for nothing.

From the perspective of the Democrats, MAGA should obviously be a much larger threat to the US than even a nuclear armed Iran. Who knows how many lives a pandemic managed by RFK Jr would claim, or what blunders Trump might commit while conducting (or failing to conduct) a war over vital interests of the US through social media? By contrast, the damage Iran is likely to do seems limited, even if they take tolls for passage that would not a much of a threat to the US, plenty of countries with questionable regimes have nukes.

Obviously the Democrats would not want Trump to earn a triumph for his war, but I doubt that there is much chance of that. The most powerful person in Iran had his father and his wife killed by US strikes and also adheres to the same religion as Hamas does. I seriously doubt that he will be willing to make large concessions to the US.

The dominant strategy for almost any politician, or really any social movement, is to criticize a lot but do nothing so as to avoid accountability. Even if the US gets its strategic goals, which is not a given, all the average American feels is the immediate economic disruption so it'll feel like a loss. Especially if that hypothetical American consumes news hostile to Trump. Actually stopping or hindering Trump gives the republicans a dolchstosslegende they can use to marginally gain back some voters. In terms of pure politics, and even if your goal is maximum blue tribe policies, not interfering with the Iran war is dominant strategy for now.

The most powerful person in Iran had his father and his wife killed by US strikes and also adheres to the same religion as Hamas does.

Then we will choose next more powerful person in Iran once the ceasefire is over.

Is there not value in the Democrats showing that they hold distinct values to the republicans? At least online, it is not uncommon to hear that the two are no different and equally bad for your country. Voting to end the war shows a clear dividing line between the two parties, on an issue important to the voters.

Next time someone says that the dems are just as much puppeted by the Israelis as the GOP and would have done the exact same thing if given the reigns, this vote will be a point of evidence that no, this is in fact not the case. They are clearly against wars in the middle east. And if the bill had passed and led to the war ending, they could have then taken credit for saving a situation of chaos created by Trump.

As a non-American, I am probably missing something. But the decision seems pretty sound to me.

It's what they want to signal, but it's pretty naive to believe it. I'm sure most of them are overjoyed with Trump attacking Iran now; it's something that might have needed to do in the future, that would almost certainly have a political cost no matter who does it and why, and their current impotence makes it so they can virtue signal as loud as they can since they cannot be blamed for not doing enough to stop it (since they can't anyway).

This isn't a bad move since the Dems knew they obviously wouldn't be able to succeed. It just shows they're trying (in a fake way) to stop it so they can use this as an attack ad later. Even if the Dems controlled both houses they still probably wouldn't be able to stop Trump doing most of what he wants since the Legislative branch has basically ceded almost all control over military + diplomacy to the Executive, and it would take a filibuster-proof majority to unwind that.

Strategically speaking, preventing Trump from continuing his war seems like a classic case of interrupting your opponent while he is making a mistake.

This again? Maybe you haven’t been following the news? The blockade is working, oil tanker traffic in the strait is up, Iran might be coming to the table. Oil tankers are coming to the US to refuel. Trump is hosting talks between Israel and Lebanon. America announced a new partnership with Indonesia which will give America control over the strait of Malacca. We now control Venezuela, Panama, Hormuz, Taiwan, Malacca. America controls not a majority of the important sources of global energy, and the chokepoints through which that energy is traded.

Maybe Trump and Hegseth had a plan after all?

The idea was that, even though America destroyed Iran’s military and military-industrial base, Iran was winning because they controlled the Strait of Hormuz. Not anymore! We took that back in an afternoon. We always could have. Because America has total dominance over Iran, because we won. The delay was not some kind of epic American failure but the natural ebb and flow when negotiating terms, working out deals, testing military alliances and technologies etc. (America is not happy that Europe denied us use of our bases — and refused to condemn Iranian terrorism.)

However I do see that the Iranian Consulate in Hyderabad got 116K likes on a tweet saying America can’t block Iran when Iran blocked us first. And I have to admit that one of the Iranian LEGO AI Trump-Hegseth “Epstein Fury” rap videos is pretty catchy and has been stuck in my head all week. Call it a tie?

Basically, Trump is rearranging the whole global order on America’s terms. Of course Democrats would want to be stop that. It would be good for them if they could. The idea that it would be bad for them is some kind of reverse jiu-jitsu that requires the war actually be going so badly for Trump that they would be saving him. I don’t know that it adds anything at this point for me to say that l obviously, if you believe that, I disagree. But just as obviously Trump launched a war that is deeply divisive with his base and relatively unpopular domestically and even at this great point of vulnerability Democrats can’t stop him. So I don’t think it’s a convincing use of power for the Dems. Their best hope is that the negotiations with Iran drag out for months and the blockades last a while and oil stays closer to $5 a gallon. Which is always possible. But it’s probably a bad idea for them to rest on their laurels and hope that Trump’s sign of timing suddenly fails him right before the midterms.

The most powerful person in Iran had his father and his wife killed by US strikes and also adheres to the same religion as Hamas does.

You mean Khomeini Jr.? The puppet? They literally inaugurated a cardboard cutout because he couldn’t be seen in public.

The blockade is working, oil tanker traffic in the strait is up

These 2 statements are contradictory.

Iran was winning because they controlled the Strait of Hormuz. Not anymore!

No serious analyst claimed Iran controlled Hormuz directly, as if they had an armada guarding it or something. The point was always that they could block it through threats and asymmetric action, which they clearly did, and the US has thus far been unable to rectify.

At any day Iran might come to the negotiating table, but this war has been full of fits and starts and so I wouldn't trust any "public statements" from either side until they've been put into practice for several days at the very least.

Trump is rearranging the whole global order on America’s terms.

The only thing Trump has done has been to unite the world against the US. He's shown the world the US military is strong tactically, but is still woefully deficient in terms of long-term strategy due to a number of factors -- exceptionally low pain tolerance, overstretch, insufficient missile stocks for long campaigns, political winds shifting, etc.

These 2 statements are contradictory.

We are blockading Iran and allowing other traffic through the strait.

No serious analyst claimed Iran controlled Hormuz directly,

Well I don’t know what this qualification “no serious analyst claimed” means but I know that this was widely discussed and claimed in many places, including here. If anything it sounds like you’re trying to carve yourself an exception: but the problem is Iran never controlled the straits and never could, because of the American military operation.

and the US has thus far been unable to rectify.

You should go look at today’s news. Actually, before you do, would you give me a confidence rating that your analysis will hold up? What do you think the odds are that the US will reopen the Straits of Hormuz?

The only thing Trump has done has been to unite the world against the US.

Venezuela is in America’s orbit now, Indonesia is in America’s orbit now, Iran is at the negotiating table, Japan is re-arming, we control Panama, we control Taiwan — wait I’m just repeating myself. America is more isolated than ever as its power over global sea lanes and energy supply rises — sure yeah let’s go with that.

this was widely discussed and claimed in many places, including here.

I have not seen anyone claim this, including on this site. I've been paying attention to the conversation pretty well though obviously I might have missed something. Please provide a source for this. Specifically I'm looking for evidence that people thought Iran "controlled" the straits beyond simple area-of-denial.

You should go look at today’s news.

There have been a lot of claims people in the war, especially Trump, have made that subsequently failed to hold up. On April 11th he claimed unequivocally that the US had destroyed the entire Iranian military, and that the strait would soon be open. There was also the "ceasefire" where Iran was supposed to open the strait, but they just didn't. I wouldn't trust any "breaking news" until it's been in effect for several days and verified by at least a few independent sources.

would you give me a confidence rating that your analysis will hold up? What do you think the odds are that the US will reopen the Straits of Hormuz?

I can't speak to the likelihood of the straits opening through diplomacy since that could change at any time.

In terms of a military campaign wherein the US navy tries to open the strait in the face of Iranian opposition, I'd say it's relatively unlikely by the end of April, but maybe a 50-50 by the end of May and then slightly higher by the end of June. By "open" I mean any single day in the IMF portwatch showing >= 60 ships passing, which would be on the lower end of pre-war traffic.

Now please give me your confidence rating.

Venezuela is in America’s orbit now, Indonesia is in America’s orbit now, Iran is at the negotiating table, Japan is re-arming, we control Panama, we control Taiwan — wait I’m just repeating myself. America is more isolated than ever as its power over global sea lanes and energy supply rises — sure yeah let’s go with that.

A country "being in America's orbit" doesn't mean much beyond rhetoric. Indonesia signed some minor cooperation agreement with the US but it's hardly a steadfast American ally now. It's a similar story with Venezuela -- they're a bit more pliable to US demands but they're hardly some US asset now.

These are paltry gains compared to the huge rupture of trust between the US and the rest of NATO. America actually could really use the rest of NATO's help now in patrolling the straits, but Trump failed to get European buy-in for his Iran adventure before the war, so that + threats of invading Greenland have given the Europeans no motivation to pull America's chestnuts out of the fire.

Specifically I'm looking for evidence that people thought Iran "controlled" the straits beyond simple area-of-denial.

So you're looking for someone who says "control" and means "control", which is not any of the people saying "control" and meaning "area denial"?

Bit of a tough ask, because you can always say that words mean whatever you want them to, but:

At the moment the Strait of Hormuz is under the de facto rule of the Iranian military

BBC, tanker representative

Tehran’s ‘toll booth’ system is now controlling Hormuz traffic

Lloyd's List, but I guess you could argue they didn't control the Strait, merely the traffic through it, and that those are two very different things.

Allowing Iran to continue to control the crucial waterway is likely to be highly unpalatable to Gulf states including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE.

Financial Times, and if they continue to control it, well, that must mean they already had control.

The blockade is working, oil tanker traffic in the strait is up

These 2 statements are contradictory.

The blockade is against traffic to Iranian ports and (more recently) against sanctioned tankers. Not against unsanctioned tankers using the strait to visit non-Iranian ports.

OK sure.

What are you even saying here? You agree, you disagree, you want to argue but don't have an argument, you just want to express snarky disdain, you understand and acknowledge the point? This is why we have a rule against low-effort posting. It's annoying and contributes nothing.

I simply agree with him. No snark intended.

It seems clear that MAGA is searching for an off-ramp whose taking they can sell as a win.

I'm getting tired of this whole concept. I understand that a lot of people think the Trump administration, and apparently the US military at large, are all fools who can't think more than a few days ahead. But Trump had an offramp if that's all he wanted, it was called accepting Iran's demands during the negotiations. Instead, the US held firm to their nuclear disarmament requirements. This is a clear signal to me that the administration does in fact have goals in this conflict beyond improving their poll numbers. In other words, it's pretty clear to me that MAGA is not searching for an off-ramp, and I would love hear what evidence you have for holding the opposite position.

Vance apparently asked for a 20 year halt on enrichment (and handing over the remaining uranium). Now they're thinking about releasing $20b of frozen assets in exchange. It's hard to see how this isn't just the JCPOA but worse in most aspects.

That link is paywalled, but assuming it's correct, releasing frozen assets is not the same as giving them money. And giving them money in exchange for uranium is not the same as giving them money in exchange for the promise not to enrich uranium. So, not exactly JCPOA. Regardless, speculation on leaked details of the negotiation is basically just self-gratification. I'm certainly holding my judgment at least until we see terms in an official agreement.

Their first plan was to overthrow the government by killing a handful of people in an undeclared war during negotiations. They ended up killing 160 school girls and the theory of the mass spontaneous pro American popular uprising failed spectacularly. Then the strategy morphed into a mass bombing campaign in which a vast amount of munition was wasted. This ended with the largest loss of aircraft in a single day since the Vietnam war and the US missile stockpiles being too depleted to continue. Then there was lots of hype around a land invasion that wasn't feasible and they had to give up on.

Their last face saving measure is that the country that has been three weeks from having nukes for 30 years doesn't have nukes. Never mind that they obliterated and annihilate their nuclear program last year according to themselves.

They are desperately seeking an off ramp and trying to get something they can show as a win.

Are the "160 school girls" supposed to be special in some way?

The fundamental problem that the Iranian regime faces is that even if we take their claims at face value, who are we to care?

They can throw all the shade they like but they still need to convince Rubio, Vance, Et Al. that there is an advantage to the US to be had in not dismissing them out of hand.

Are the "160 school girls" supposed to be special in some way?

A decent portion of the world's population is horrified by America's actions and psychopathic killing.

The big problem for the US is that the US is up to its eyeballs in debt and the US has an oil intensive economy. Since Trump decided to focus on starting wars in the middle east instead of America first there is now an energy crisis that can only be solved by Trump TACO-ing.

A decent portion of the world's population is horrified by America's actions and psychopathic killing.

To quote our Vice President, I don’t really care.

A decent portion of the world's population is horrified by America's actions and psychopathic killing.

A decent portion of the world thinks that the meat comes from the back of Costco and have no understanding of the amount of violence and stuff that modern society is built upon as a brief island in the chain. Without even getting into the old 'if X regime found themselves in the position of dominance occasional civilian casualties would be a tiny fraction of what they'd immediately, enthusiastically get up to'

A decent portion of the world's population is horrified by America's actions and psychopathic killing.

A decent portion of the world's population apparently also would have demanded the Allies sue for peace during WWII as soon as the first civilians were killed during D-Day, or the first reports of a soviet atrocity, or the first news that the Japanese on the mainland were struggling with food insecurity.

Look, every single civilian death is a goddamn tragedy, and the US military can and should do better, particularly in the opening salvos of a campaign against a long-hostile regime. But unlike the Iranian regime, the US appears to be trying to only target military and military-use infrastructure, and I refuse to accept special pleading as valid in this case.

Are the "160 school girls" supposed to be special in some way?

Has the number even been verified to any deep degree? I personally don't doubt that a school was hit but it feels like a pretty significant highroll unless they happened to hit an assembly or something.

Who cares about exact numbers. One is too much for some, a thousand is just a shrug for the others.

The exact number determines how many martyrs you can justify, right? 160 would mean that up to 2 freedom fighters could securely murder-suicide themselves, but a third would only get about 22% of what he's owed in the afterlife.

On the other hand it is thocratic Muslim country so the number of virgins between them may be less than the body count. In Iran marriage under 13 is allowed in some circumstances.

Has the number even been verified to any deep degree?

Not that I am aware of, and even if it were verified I don't think I would care. Much like @Iconochasm above, I find the complaint fundamentally unserious. The Iranian Regime purposefully kills thousands of it's own people and habitually threatens to attack it's neighbors and everybody just accepts this as normal, but the US accidentally kills 160 due to outdated information and suddenly "A decent portion of the world's population is horrified by America's actions and psychopathic killing."?

I don't buy it, and I wouldn't expect Trump, Rubio, Vance, Et Al. to either.

I don't buy it, and I wouldn't expect Trump, Rubio, Vance, Et Al. to either.

I'd go a step further. They shouldn't buy it, and being indifferent to exactly that sort of bad faith manipulation is Trump's entire brand and greatest selling point. Which in turn is exactly why so many people find him aesthetically horrifying.

What, are you suggesting that Iran, leader of the axis of resistance that routinely hides military assets in restricted sites, might... lie for propaganda purposes?

Or exaggerate a real but smaller number of casualties? Or obfuscate if there was a valid military objective moved inside the school during the pre-war dispersals? Or benignly omit any past history or context of the infrastructure that might lead non-psychopaths to believe something nefarious?

Surely not. If you can't believe the government that months prior was killing thousands to over ten thousand citizens in the streets, who can you trust?

I'm sad you mentioned the school girls because people are going to fixate on that and not this, which is a much stronger point

Their last face saving measure is that the country that has been three weeks from having nukes for 30 years doesn't have nukes. Never mind that they obliterated and annihilate their nuclear program last year according to themselves.

The strikes last year targeted a specific nuclear enrichment base built underground in the mountains that was supposed to be impenetrable to attack. The strikes this year are attacking, among other things, the nuclear enrichment as a whole. They are basically two separate events and the latter does not imply that the former was all propaganda and a lie.

https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-remarks-prime-time-address-iran-air-strikes-june-21-2025/

"Our objective was the destruction of Iran's nuclear enrichment capacity and a stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world's number one state sponsor of terror."

"Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated."

Others have discussed your fixation on the school strike, but as far as I can tell your entire understanding of the conflict comes from propaganda headlines.

Their first plan was to overthrow the government

That was never a stated goal. You should know that.

the theory of a mass spontaneous pro American popular uprising

There was already a mass spontaneous uprising, and there still is an Iranian dissident movement. If you're actually curious there are plenty of interviews available with Iranian activists who will explain this for you.

the strategy morphed into a mass bombing campaign

No, that was the strategy from the beginning. You can't 'morph' into a bombing campaign, you need to have the bombs and their launch systems already in the region - but besides that, they started bombing on day 1, hour 1, so this is an insane claim.

a vast amount of munition was wasted

Sorry, says who? The accuracy of US munitions has been incredible, and 99% struck their intended military targets. 'Wasted' here only makes sense from a strategic perspective of 'we shouldn't be striking Iranian targets to begin with' - in other words, your reasoning is circular. The war is bad because we're wasting munitions, and the munitions are wasted because the war is bad.

This ended with the largest loss of aircraft in a single day since the Vietnam war

Another emotional headline. It's also false. The September 2012 Taliban raid on Camp Bastion destroyed nine aircraft. But you saw the headline somewhere and decided to uncritically repeat it.

US missile stockpiles being too depleted to continue

This may be an even more ridiculous claim. The number of missiles in US stockpiles is quite literally Top Secret. But I guess you've concluded from all your military expertise that the real reason for the cease-fire was that the US has no weapons left?

They are desperately seeking an off ramp and trying to get something they can show as a win.

I gave an argument against this in my initial response, and you did not address it. Instead, as I've demonstrated, you threw out a bunch of wrong-headed and often simply false claims to back up your emotional reasoning that the war is bad. Maybe you can do better with your next response?

Others have discussed your fixation on the school strike, but as far as I can tell your entire understanding of the conflict comes from propaganda headlines.

No, it is built on a decades long pattern of wars that have cost trillions, killed millions of people and flooded Europe with migrants. This is just another example of the US trying to wreck a country in the middle east to divide and conquer and the world paying the price.

That was never a stated goal.

Regime change was widely talked about in the initial stage of the war. That failed. They were going to save the women through a collapse of the state. The former dictator's son was paraded around because they wanted to topple the government.

There was already a mass spontaneous uprising,

Trump has openly admitted that they were funded and armed by the US.

The accuracy of US munitions has been incredible

Patriot missiles failing on launch and 8 patriots being fired at a single target isn't impressive. A substantial portion of the US airforce munitions were wasted on a war to replace an Ayatollah with his son.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-04/us-deploys-bulk-of-stealthy-long-range-missile-for-iran-war

A quarter of all tomahawks were fired. They couldn't have gone that much longer without making the US too weak.

cost trillions, killed millions

This is unfortunately hilarious to me, because my hyper-political family member regularly posts the phrase "Costing trillions, killing millions" on Facebook, often as part of particularly unhinged rants, and it's therefore rather difficult for me to take seriously just due to overexposure.

Contrary to your stance, however, she sees Europe being flooded with migrants as a good thing, because they're so much more virtuous and intelligent and hard-working than the average European national (and, of course, even the worst European native is far superior to any white American!)

Based on this what would you estimate the odds are that a deal is negotiated and Iran cedes its enriched uranium supply?

'Wasted' here only makes sense from a strategic perspective of 'we shouldn't be striking Iranian targets to begin with' - in other words, your reasoning is circular. The war is bad because we're wasting munitions, and the munitions are wasted because the war is bad.

It does have the echo of the totally-not-pro-Russians of yesteryear who were very adamant that the west was giving too much aid to Ukraine, and very evasive about what an 'appropriate' amount of aid was.

This is the part that kills me about this.

Iran purposely slaughters 30k protestors: I sleep.

America has outdated targeting data on one bomb out of 30k: Real shit.

It just seems fundamentally unserious. It's impossible for me to take criticism from someone espousing this position as anything other than bad faith. You would need a thousand words of throat-clearing denunciations of the Iranian regime to counter the obvious who/whom.

The same people who sold us the atrocity propaganda before every other war want to sell this fanciful number. I highly doubt they gave us an honest number in this case.

Also, Trump openly admitted that they were armed and financed by the US. If one accepts money and weapons from the enemy to attack the state I have no problem with them being pwnd when their revolution fails

Again and again you've read a headline and not managed to make it to the details.

Trump admitted to sending arms to the Iranian protestors, but those arms never made it to Iran. They were given to the Kurds to pass on, but the Kurds kept them for themselves. Trump says this in the same interview where he admits to sending the arms. He also, as should be blindingly obvious, sent them after the revolution was already underway.

It is completely unacceptable for you to keep spouting such low-effort nonsense. That's not how we do things here.

Alternative idea, forcing this vote makes Republican representatives have to tie themselves to the war at a time where gas prices are over 4 dollars, there's an upcoming 8% surcharge on shipping, and airlines are increasing their prices with some even slowly shutting down routes. One of the major reasons why Trump won is because of the COVID era inflation crisis. You could see tons of those "Trump low prices, Kamala high prices" signs around and voters consistently put economics as one of their biggest concerns. Now Republican representatives are having to say "yes, this war is worth fucking up your wallets". There's not much room for them to win even if things resolve tomorrow cause foreign policy is not a major focus of most voters and a lot to lose.

gas prices are over 4 dollars

Not disagreeing with your lived experience, but locally gas has dropped $0.40 in the last two weeks. Still up from pre-Iran debacle but closer to the summer-increase margin.

Mostly I'm pointing this out to say: this market's crazy and whether this affects voters this fall will be decided, mostly, in the last few days before the midterm.

Mostly I'm pointing this out to say: this market's crazy and whether this affects voters this fall will be decided, mostly, in the last few days before the midterm.

Only if early voting gets banned, which I think isn't on the table.

gas prices are over 4 dollars, there's an upcoming 8% surcharge on shipping, and airlines are increasing their prices with some even slowly shutting down routes.

The irony is that this is what the "reduce dependency on fossil fuels/get rid of oil" crowd want, and we see now what it means in action. Not a tidy "everything now runs on wind and solar power" but "you can't get goods in, you can't get a flight to where you want to go" and advice like that from my government to do chores at night when running electrically powered items like washing machines, and walking to work instead of driving.

In the US, we didn't so much reduce dependence on fossil fuels as we did reduce (but not eliminate) dependence on Middle Eastern fossil fuels. That's why gas is only $4.15 near me in New Jersey, and there's no serious worry about domestic supplies.

If Europe had actually reduced dependence on fossil fuels, they wouldn't be being hit so hard. But they didn't, not nearly to the extent they often claim to have.

The funny thing is that the economy was generally doing well pre-war. Dow was over 50k as someone pointed out, employment was good. Tariffs were paid for by Americans but weren't as big a drag as expected either, although core goods inflation would have been negative without them? He really could have done nothing, toned down ICE's retardation, and coasted.

I don't know if he could have coasted.

Wasn't it Israel which launched the first strikes without asking America for permission? Refusing to help an ally is a political risk, and if Israel managed to start winning heavily enough the strait might have been blockaded anyway.

Per NYT, Israel told the US that they had intel about a meeting between Khameini and other IRGC leaders in a few days time and pitched it as the best time to strike. If the US had declined to get involved, Israel probably would not have gone ahead.

That's my understanding as well. The strikes were coming, one way or another, but Israel saw a hell of a great chance if they started things off early.

DJIA is up since the start of the war especially now that the blockade is in place. The economy is doing fine so far and has priced the war in. The only lingering consequence is the high price of gas (which has not quite hit 2022 highs and is nowhere close to 2008 highs).

If the Democratic party in fact succeeded in using the legislature to stop the war, then I'm sure they would have been scapegoated. Which indeed would have made it a bad political maneuver. However, since they didn't, and they couldn't because they lacked the votes in both chambers of congress, it made it a great political maneuver. They managed to publicly disavow the war while forcing their opponents own it and its consequences in their entirety.

Another indicator that AI is a bubble. Anthropic just released Claude Opus 4.7, and users are reporting significantly higher token burn rates (and therefore costs) for what appears to be a minor improvement over Opus 4.6. Discussion on Orange Reddit is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47816960 and a tracker of the increased token burn rate is here: https://tokens.billchambers.me/leaderboard

The token tracker is based on user reporting, but has been fluctuating between 37% and 45%.

Even if AGI is actually possible with LLMs (or at all, but I'm not trying to start a discussion on metaphysics here), it looks like the capital needed to achieve it is drying up before it can be reached. Anthropic's move here (combined with them handicapping Opus 4.6 a few weeks ago) seems to clearly be an attempt to achieve profitability. The free/subsidized rate train for end users has pulled into the station, and now you have to pay more for the same (or worse) capabilities you were enjoying before.

I normally don't care much for the median Hacker News commenter (if me calling it Orange Reddit didn't already give that away), but I do find them to be a useful barometer for general sentiment in the tech industry. And a few months ago I would have said roughly 60% of HN users were AI believers/enthusiasts, 20% neutral or unsure, and 20% anti/negative. Anthropic's antics over the last few months (and Sam Altman's antics for his entire life) seem to have soured their views significantly, and I see this as a big sign of a sea change in sentiment about AI in the tech industry.

At least for me personally, I just hope this leads to less retarded mandates from my higher-ups about using AI X times a month etc. (we're literally tracked on usage and it can affect our raises/bonuses).

For everyone here, nut perhaps especially the AGI believers, have your feelings changed at all over the last few months?

Even if AGI is actually possible with LLMs

I'm pretty convinced it isn't, based on a thought experiment I read about.

The argument goes basically like this:

Suppose you take the latest and greatest LLM and use it to generate a huge corpus of text and use that text to train a new LLM. And then repeat the process a number of times. Intuitively, it seems unlikely that the result will be any better than what you started with. And apparently both experiments and mathematics indicates that what happens is "model collapse," i.e. with each iteration the new model performs worse. Because you always lose a little with each iteration. Assuming that's all true, it follows that LLMs must be missing some essential attribute possessed by human brains. Because we apparently picked ourselves up by our bootstraps and created from scratch all the text which is used to create LLMs.

Anyway, it's just an argument I read and found to be persuasive. Feel free to correct me.

Another indicator that AI is a bubble

To me it's pretty obvious that AI is wildly over-hyped. But even so, the progress which has been made in the field is nothing short of astounding.

it looks like the capital needed to achieve it is drying up before it can be reached.

If nothing else, it's seems virtually certain to me that governments have realized the strategic implications of AI. Even without any private investment at all, the United States, China, and various other countries can throw quite a lot of resources at the problem.

For everyone here, nut perhaps especially the AGI believers, have your feelings changed at all over the last few months?

Not really, I'm still pretty confident that (1) within the next 10 years or so, we (humanity) will get to AGI; and (2) regardless, there will be huge changes to the world economy.

I'm also convinced that LLM's aren't the path to AGI. They were grossly overrated from the very beginning. If you want real AI, you have to dump the snake oil. It's already empirically well adduced (1, 2) that LLM's can't get you there.

There's a 'lot' of things you need before you've actually got an intelligent machine that can think. It begins with constructing mental models. From there, you navigate those models in the imagination or perceptual space laid out to work out answers to questions and work out alternatives. Once you build those spaces (and in this case I mean building creative and entirely novel ones) and navigate them to accelerate anticipatory learning. Cats for example actually "learn" how to hunt by doing this. Once you've learned how to model spaces you can them move to modeling "systems;" and that's when you get to the point where it becomes possible to give AGI a theory of 'other' minds. And a "mind" in purely mechanistic and computational terms is simply another causal system; just like "spaces" and "systems" are particular causal systems.

Notice that's exactly what an LLM 'doesn't' do. If you take a look at Waymo's World Model for instance, this is exactly more along the lines for the correct pathway of approach that you need. When you're continuously inventing new models of imaginary environments, you begin to build the skillsets that slowly become applicable to the real world. When it can do that, that's more along the lines of where scaling becomes effective. Nothing like Sam Altman's idea of where it's relevant. When you've got to that stage, AI can then begin to model it's own causal system to think about it's own thinking such that it's capable of asking itself when it's wrong; or how to stack a particular sequence of events to achieve a desired end result.

Incidentally this is the exact pathway natural selection determined for human beings and I'm thoroughly convinced it's the 'only' way to get AGI. This is what human beings fundamentally are on the naturalist paradigm: models and model builders that also navigate and move about in those models. There's zero evidence that I've seen to indicate that the money flowing into AI at the present moment is traveling down that research pathway and make no mistake, eventually the supply of it is going to run out. But make no mistake. A 'lot' of rich people are stupid, so it's doubtful it'll ever go to the real thing. They'll throw it all at the next bullshit snake oil, get their fiscal bailout and blame it on immigrants on something. Presently I'm not left feeling very optimistic about the current state of the industry. It's incredibly destructive to the environment, it dumbs down the human intelligence, and it hasn't even been proven to even work. Why is the “world” so excited?

Because we apparently picked ourselves up by our bootstraps and created from scratch all the text which is used to create LLMs.

This is clearly proof that the Saurian Overlords of Agatha in the Hollow Earth taught us language.

More seriously, isn't there a lot of research going into using synthetic data safely? I thought that the current consensus was that you can avoid model collapse with synthetic data if it's properly labeled as such.

More seriously, isn't there a lot of research going into using synthetic data safely? I thought that the current consensus was that you can avoid model collapse with synthetic data if it's properly labeled as such.

I have no idea, but intuitively it seems to me that training with synthetic data is something that can't possibly work. To be sure, I am neither a mathematician nor a computer scientist. But as I understand things, the basic operation of an LLM is to predict the most likely words to follow a string of words. Which is done by training a neural network on lots of text. It's difficult for me to see how an LLM could get better at predicting words if it's trained on its own output. It seems to me that if you created an LLM using a corpus of synthetic data, the best you could realistically hope to do would be to reverse-engineer the original LLM which had created the synthetic data in the first place.

Anyone who is a subject matter expert, feel free to correct me.

I have no idea, but intuitively it seems to me that training with synthetic data is something that can't possibly work.

I agree with you intuitively. However large amounts of Serious People are spending large amounts of Serious Economic Resources to do literally just that. So they clearly see something there.

Mythos seems to be yet another OOM of compute and training and we can be sure a good % of that was synthetic at this point as they already ate the entire corpus of human writing a while ago

I agree with you intuitively. However large amounts of Serious People are spending large amounts of Serious Economic Resources to do literally just that. So they clearly see something there.

Part of me wonders whether this might be some kind of mass delusion and/or grift. It wouldn't be the first time something like that has happened. That being said, I am not a subject matter expert and haven't studied these issues carefully so I couldn't really say.

What made me even more dubious about the entire grand project than I had already been was the news that now they were generating their own data to train models on. We've scraped every single bit of text produced by humans in all of history to date (ahem ahem I take my leave to doubt that, what you mean is 'we've scraped all the available English language text online') and now we need even more to feed the gaping maw of Behemoth, so now we have to invent our own synthetic text generated by AI.

Do they not remember "garbage in, garbage out" or, indeed, Flanderization? Generating your own synthetic data off sythetic data and using that to create more synthetic data and synthetic demographics is getting further and further away from reality, then some poor fool uses the conclusions your AI served up so prettily to make real world decisions and it turns out that in fact 15-24 year old mixed race lower middle class exurban teenagers with sports scholarships do NOT want to wear pink clamdiggers topped off with stovepipe hats. That's your entire chain of stores' summer wear stock now useless even on sale.

While I share your skepticsm, this Dineen makes intuitive sense. But given that all the labs seem to be doing this and are not super concerned about it, I assume it serves it's purpose.

Mythos is a big boy, I imagine there's lot of synthetic data in there and it seems to be working

Suppose you take the latest and greatest LLM and use it to generate a huge corpus of text and use that text to train a new LLM. And then repeat the process a number of times. Intuitively, it seems unlikely that the result will be any better than what you started with. And apparently both experiments and mathematics indicates that what happens is "model collapse," i.e. with each iteration the new model performs worse. Because you always lose a little with each iteration. Assuming that's all true, it follows that LLMs must be missing some essential attribute possessed by human brains. Because we apparently picked ourselves up by our bootstraps and created from scratch all the text which is used to create LLMs.

Where did you hear that anyone is proposing to reach AGI via LLMs by training LLMs on their own generated output? That's clearly dumb and not what people propose. The model has to interact with something real, it has to "touch grass", for it to work. That's the external information. For example a coding LLM can get an informative learning signal by running its generated code through the compiler and running tests and seeing if the resulting program compiles, passes the tests, uses less RAM or is faster, etc. I'm not saying that leads to AGI, but there are clearly ways to obtain information from the outside world, and it's not just about sewing a pipe from the LLM's ass back into its mouth.

Where did you hear that anyone is proposing to reach AGI via LLMs by training LLMs on their own generated output? That's clearly dumb and not what people propose.

I presented the idea as a thought experiment, not as an actual proposal.

No, you presented it as a conceptual proof that LLMs will never get better. All it takes is one innovation that addresses your concern about recycled data to make it invalid. All arguments about intelligence are necessarily a bit wishy-washy, mind you, so I'm not saying your thought experiment is useless.

I think if you really want to argue that LLMs have an inherent cap on their capability, you should address their actual algorithm rather than how they're trained. However much we rejigger them with CoT thinking and non-text data sources, they're fundamentally not designed for anything more than next-token prediction. It should be a source of constant surprise that they do so well on such a wide variety of non-creative-writing tasks (look at early SSC posts about GPT3's output to see this surprise evolve in real time). You could argue that if LLMs end up hitting a soft or hard limit, that's really just the "surprise" petering out, that we really can't just take a glorified text completer and keep pumping neurons into it until it's a genius.

I don't personally believe this will happen, but hey, I don't think anyone really knows for sure.

No, you presented it as a conceptual proof that LLMs will never get better.

Umm, no. In fact I totally think that LLMs will get better.

I presented it as a thought experiment to show that LLMs seem to be missing some essential attribute possessed by human brains.

ll it takes is one innovation that addresses your concern about recycled data to make it invalid.

Yes, of course. Well, perhaps more than one innovation. But yes, if LLMs are missing something important; and we create LLMs 2.0 which include that important thing (or those important things), then yeah, we'll have AGI.

And apparently both experiments and mathematics indicates that what happens is "model collapse," i.e. with each iteration the new model performs worse.

Model collapse is not really a major concern. The original researchers in that paper trained small models on only AI outputs (of the previous model). Them being small models, they made mistakes and the mistakes compounded over time. It's more like a Chinese whispers experiment.

Big companies make great use of synthetic data and autonomous training, in addition to human originated data. For example, consider Deepseek R1-Zero, which was just trained on reinforcement learning, verified signals and not human reasoning patterns. It was kind of weird and switched languages a lot but it did work and got smarter over the course of training. In fact, all modern models are trained in this way. When Claude occasionally slips into Chinese for a single word it's not because any human ever does that in the training corpus, it's because during the training process they have them autonomously bootstrap and get smarter over time and that's just how it goes. AIs are omnilingual by nature it seems.

Model collapse is not really a major concern.

If you say so, I have no reason to doubt you. But what does that say about the thought experiment I proposed? Are you saying that potentially the 1000th model could be significantly better than the first?

Yes, I think so, provided you were doing the training in a sophisticated way rather than solely training on the outputs of previous models without grading for quality or accuracy. You could get AIs to review the data for example for any errors or issues or have them work out a testing suite to check if the data is right. Data quality is very important, that and the right RL techniques are basically the two key things you need most to get right.

Microsoft Phi trains just on synthetic data and is very cost-efficient, that was its primary goal, making a good very small AI that can run on most PCs. But they curated the data a fair bit to make sure it was good.

In principle I think you could do the same for big first rate AIs too. It's just that it wouldn't be efficient to leave out human data and human curation (it's there, why not use it, the competition will) and you want something humans enjoy working with and not a schizo-sounding model. It'd be like o3 at its most alien but more so:

https://arxiv.org/html/2510.27338v1

they soared parted illusions overshadow marinade illusions overshadow marinade illusions overshadow marinade illusions

Number of relevant organic products depends on whether both of!mena get.demoteudes someone and gem jer eats SAND the protonation-bids, leading possibly to three product calculation

Like wtf does that mean? Who knows? This is an artifact from inhuman RL processes. The inhuman RL processes work, that's why they're used.

Intuitively, it seems unlikely that the result will be any better than what you started with. And apparently both experiments and mathematics indicates that what happens is "model collapse," i.e. with each iteration the new model performs worse.

Yes, this follows from data processing inequality.

Assuming that's all true, it follows that LLMs must be missing some essential attribute possessed by human brains. Because we apparently picked ourselves up by our bootstraps and created from scratch all the text which is used to create LLMs.

No. It applies just as well to humans. And humans did not build a civilization by thinking really hard at a corpus of word sequences. Oh, we tried this too, to an extent, and got wonders like Sophistry, Rabbinical Judaism, Medieval Scholasticism, Marxism and Rationalism. But we mostly progressed by receiving environmental feedback, filtering the generated data and preferentially training on validated fraction. Similar logic can be applied to LLMs (or any ML artifacts). This is why the basic trick of the current paradigm is RLVR (reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards). You finetune a model on successful trajectories, then you give it tasks and update towards policy that has generated correct conclusions. The primary source of updates is the model itself, steered by an external verifier. In principle they can do this fully autonomously, by building an ontology of possible tasks that can be algorithmically verified, coding these verifiers, and generating (eg relying on web search) queries against these tasks.

Even under very rudimentary realistic assumptions, generated data improves model performance.

We formulated our understandings of the world and our interactions with it into techniques and theories, and when we build stuff we do so by employing those techniques and theories from a standpoint of engineering and design. LLMs are merely next word generators. They can recall many of the things in their databases and expurgate them to us, but their outputs aren't the products of strategically employed techniques and theories. This is inherently limiting for the complexity of the outputs they can give us.

I don't understand this claim. Who "we"? Most people learn almost everything they know about economically valuable complex domains from textbooks, manuals, teacher's answers and such second-hand information, and then polish it with on-site instructions and increasingly long-range, open-ended training. They don't build much in the way of their own "techniques and theories" and there's not a world of difference from what LLMs now do. Maybe you're overestimating how much they depend on pretraining at this point. Well, it's believed that >50% of compute in some of the last-generation models goes towards RL, not pretraining on human data.

And as I've said in the opening post: we have literally just seen an LLM employ a technique no human mathematician had thought of using in this specific context, to solve a problem that had remained unsolved since 1968 – over half a century! It wasn't some Riemann hypothesis tier challenge, but it wasn't exactly obscure either, smart professional mathematicians had been working on it for years before GPT 5.4 Pro came and did this. Moreover, GPT does this reliably. In the comments you can see Terence Tao, arguably the guy with the greatest knowledge of "techniques and theories" of math on the planet Earth, an expert of such level that he actively avoids getting roped into solving other people's frontier research level problems, seriously engage with GPT's work:

Thanks! So there does seem to be something special about the original von Mangoldt process - the associated invariant measure ν is extremely smooth (in the Archimedean sense), being asymptotic to 1/nlogn , while all the variants of this measure pick up arithmetic factors such as 1∏pvp(n)!

  • A little surprising to me that removing individual primes instead of prime powers makes it less likely to have prime multiplicity, but I'll chalk it up to one of the numerous probability paradoxes that arise when one tries to compare various weighted expectations. But these factors mean that one cannot immediately solve #1196 by using these processes instead of the von Mangoldt one, as the invariant measure is no longer asymptotic to 1/nlogn
  • So in some sense the AI was "lucky" in finding the one approach that actually worked; it would be interesting to publish the traces to see if there was a lot of brute force involved in trying nearby approaches which didn't quite work.

……

Arb Research has kindly shared with me ten separate runs of GPT 5.4 Pro on this problem #1196 (with a request not to use internet search). From a quick reading, it appears that 8 of them claimed successes, with the other 2 rating the claim as plausible. Interestingly, several of the successful runs actually obtained the sharper formula ∑n≤Aν(n)≤1 that was also derived here, with ν essentially the Mellin transform of 1/ζ(s)

  • Almost all of the runs latched on to the approach of constructing a random chain with a good hitting probability (many runs referred to this as the "Lubell method", after the Lubell of the LYM inequality).

Another notable fact is that none of the runs highlighted the von Mangoldt process that was a prominent feature of the original run (and none of them mention flow networks either). Runs 4 and 7 have an interesting alternate construction of the upward divisibility chain in terms of exponential clocks in the prime factorization indices that actually looks rather tractable to work with; I will need to study this construction further when I have more time.

Basically it seems that for this particular type of problem there are several natural ways to proceed that make the problem actually quite tractable; the literature had managed to focus on a somewhat suboptimal approach in which the opening move was to transfer the problem to a continuous setting, but the AI runs consistently stayed in the discrete world and managed to utilize various existing tools from discrete mathematics (mostly centering around methods relating to the LYM inequality) to reach a solution.

So I don't know. Where's this inherent limit on complexity that you're talking about? What in our culture is truly irreducibly complex, if not math that can surprise Terence Tao?

This is getting a bit comical, don't you think?

I must differ here as I do not see evidence (in domains I'm able to judge) of AI employing techniques and theory in its tasks. Ask it to mimic Stephen King and then compare the output to actual Stephen King. You'll understand what I mean.

I cannot speak to math here as I lack competency in that. But from what I hear from coders, its similar in that domain as well: AI can expurgate volumes of legible code, but it cannot utilize structure.

Humans have techniques and theories which inform their decisions high and low as they layer things together using judgement, intuition, etc., while AIs appear to generate text using probabilistic hacks. AI appears to be able to recreate low-complexity patterns from its dataset. I disagree that these processes are related except at a very basic level.

We have a good idea of how to train AI to solve mathematical problems, of virtually unbounded complexity. In the course of this, AI clearly learns "techniques" as shown here, if not "theories". I don't think King's prowess is theory-driven either, but in any case we don't have a good idea of how to train AI to be a good prose writer. We have some ideas, but are unlikely to act on them. There's not much money to be made in it, and plenty of highly motivated enmity – AI is already widely hated. and yes, autoregressive generation for the prompt "write like King" is not like King actually writing a novel. We have such tricks though.

My point is, it's not a general principle that AI will only rehash human techniques in some uninspired "probabilistic" way. If there is a hill to climb, such that "good" and "bad" outputs with regard to the problem statement can be distinguished, AI can bumble its way up the hill and also find new tricks. We've seen this before LLMs, with AlphaGo and move 37, we're starting to see it with LLMs.

while AIs appear to generate text using probabilistic hacks.

Human mind runs entirely on probabilistic mush. Neural networks were invented as approximation of our own approximate learning. But probabilistic decision processes can have clear enough decision boundaries that they become able to operate with "abstractions", "symbols" or "theories". They also remain able to fail. For example, you are failing to update on evidence, because you haven't been trained to take input like "Terry Tao is surprised" seriously and think it's infinitely less interesting than your preconceived notions, basically some dweeb noise. Unlike an LLM, you can update at lifetime, so maybe you'll reread the above post and see how it contradicts your position.

This is getting a bit comical, don't you think?

Seen on X:

"As the Earth is being disassembled:

"Guys, stop over-reacting! The concept of a Dyson Sphere was already in the training data!"

Heh. See, the AI making that Dyson Sphere doesn't have general intelligence, I bet it can't get the Wordle 6 days in a row like me.

No. It applies just as well to humans. And humans did not build a civilization by thinking really hard at a corpus of word sequences. Oh, we tried this too, to an extent, and got wonders like Sophistry, Rabbinical Judaism, Medieval Scholasticism, Marxism and Rationalism. But we mostly progressed by receiving environmental feedback, filtering the generated data and preferentially training on validated fraction. Similar logic can be applied to LLMs (or any ML artifacts). This is why the basic trick of the current paradigm is RLVR (reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards). You finetune a model on successful trajectories, then you give it tasks and update towards policy that has generated correct conclusions. The primary source of updates is the model itself, steered by an external verifier. In principle they can do this fully autonomously, by building an ontology of possible tasks that can be algorithmically verified, coding these verifiers, and generating (eg relying on web search) queries against these tasks.

Sadly, I do not understand this. Would you mind giving me a concrete example of the RLVR process you refer to?

Question: What is 2 + 2

Model: Hmm, that’s 2 and then another 2, so 22.

AUTOMATIC VERIFIER: WRONG

——

Model: Hmm, that’s the sum of 2 and 2, so 4

AUTOMATIC VERIFIER: CORRECT.

The model is tweaked slightly to make the second output more likely, and that output is potentially added to the training set. Repeat for arbitrarily complex mathematics and other problems as long as the solution can be verified, even if it isn’t known in advance. In this way you can generate potentially infinite amounts of data, albeit limited to certain domains. However, problem solving ability has so far extended quite well to other domains even when trained in this manner.

Question: What is 2 + 2

Model: Hmm, that’s 2 and then another 2, so 22.

AUTOMATIC VERIFIER: WRONG

——

Model: Hmm, that’s the sum of 2 and 2, so 4

AUTOMATIC VERIFIER: CORRECT.

The model is tweaked slightly to make the second output more likely, and that output is potentially added to the training set. Repeat for arbitrarily complex mathematics and other problems as long as the solution can be verified, even if it isn’t known in advance. In this way you can generate potentially infinite amounts of data, albeit limited to certain domains. However, problem solving ability has so far extended quite well to other domains even when trained in this manner.

Generally speaking, how does this "automatic verifier" work? Obviously I am not an expert but it seems like this automatic verifier would require human level intelligence.

In this toy case it's just literally a calculator (a snippet of python code). The problem is 2+2, the calculator just does 2+2 and checks if the answer is the same as the LLM output. (The LLM is trained to format the final answer in a particular manner and wrap it with special tokens, so the verifier doesn't have to be able to interpret natural language.)

You can get surprisingly far with this. If it's a calculus question, you can use an automatic differentiator to check it. Likewise for factorisation questions, metric conversion questions, algebraic manipulation of formulae, etc. you put a little work into programming the automatic verifier and you can get an infinite number of problems.

If you're a big company, you might have human domain experts doing some of this work too. If you're a smaller company you have a big LLM do verification for the smaller ones.

Then you have leetcode and programming problems, and again you can verify these automatically. Does the program compile? Is the program output what was requested? Is it faster than the previous solution?

Like I said, this only works for maths, programming, and other domains where you can verify the answer with a computer relatively cheaply, but contra the model of multiple intelligence factors, heavy training on maths and programming seems to improve general intelligence and reasoning quite well.

In this toy case it's just literally a calculator (a snippet of python code). The problem is 2+2, the calculator just does 2+2 and checks if the answer is the same as the LLM output. (The LLM is trained to format the final answer in a particular manner and wrap it with special tokens, so the verifier doesn't have to be able to interpret natural language.)

You can get surprisingly far with this. If it's a calculus question, you can use an automatic differentiator to check it. Likewise for factorisation questions, metric conversion questions, algebraic manipulation of formulae, etc. you put a little work into programming the automatic verifier and you can get an infinite number of problems.

If you're a big company, you might have human domain experts doing some of this work too. If you're a smaller company you have a big LLM do verification for the smaller ones.

Then you have leetcode and programming problems, and again you can verify these automatically. Does the program compile? Is the program output what was requested? Is it faster than the previous solution?

Like I said, this only works for maths, programming, and other domains where you can verify the answer with a computer relatively cheaply, but contra the model of multiple intelligence factors, heavy training on maths and programming seems to improve general intelligence and reasoning quite well.

Thank you for the explanation. My instinct is that even with this type of training, LLMs will still be missing something essential, but I will give it some thought.

My instinct is that even with this type of training, LLMs will still be missing something essential

Your instinct is probably correct IMO. This form of synthetic data generation is just another tool in the box, it's not the key to everything.

I will say that we've got far further than I ever expected us to get using these methods. I'm instinctively a Gary Marcus-style fan of embodiment and unsupervised learning, it seemed clear to me pre-LLM that models wouldn't be able to be anything resembling intelligent without a body and the ability to interact with the real world and 'test' their understanding in real time. When LLMs came in, I felt I had to admit that I'd been wrong. It seems clear to me that we have managed to get to something I would call 'intelligence' (even if it's spiky and fails in some cases where humans would not fail) through these means. So I no longer trust my instincts as much.

This kind of semi-supervised exploration seems like a good compromise for now. I am also very interested in LLMs that can combine next-token video generation and text generation, because video generation requires understanding a bunch of stuff about the real world in order to produce consistent results, but that's a way off.

Like I said, this only works for maths, programming, and other domains where you can verify the answer with a computer relatively cheaply,

This is what the armies of Kenyans are for. I'm actually surprised progressive libs don't use "muh mechanical Turk sweatshop" as an anti AI talking point.

Also I think in some ways what they use the thumbs up/down for? I saw people saying the sycophantic behavior of the 4o era was people love being glazed and thumbs that up a LOT so it crept in.

Marxism and Rationalism

I don't understand how these fit into the category like the religious examples

Sophistry is not religious either.

I don't want to make a definition for this category because it's very loose, but basically it's "attempts at recursively improving your understanding via introspective self-play starting from a given set of verbal premises, without any significant role for procedures of updating on empirical, physical evidence".

One can see how this might well work in fields which really don't need an empirical physical component, such as math. Physics can inspire new subdomains of math, but strictly speaking we don't need this. An AI could train on its own data (+ easy verifiers and just corrected majority voting), entirely autonomously, to become an ever stronger mathematician.

Because we apparently picked ourselves up by our bootstraps and created from scratch all the text which is used to create LLMs.

Or it holds for human brains, but we train on something higher than our text, and so LLMs are upper bounded by us if they train on our text, which is like our cognitive discard.

I’ve found Opus 4.7 to generate better and more human-like text vs Opus 4.6 for my purposes, but I can’t indicate whether it’s any better at coding. I use a mix of LLMs for various things, and my feeling is that ChatGPT is more bland and LLM-y in its output, but much more generous with usage limits. In the limited coding I’ve done, I haven’t seen much of a difference between them. ChatGPT’s image generation model is also nice, as far as my amateur impression can tell.

But it’s a constant fight with the usage limits on Claude, whereas ChatGPT feels like it flows freely. My current pattern is to default to Chat for most informational and coding purposes and bring out Claude Opus for when I want a more thoughtful analysis of something. I don’t know how Sonnet compares to ChatGPT.

Gemini feels massively behind in both usability and tooling, and its integrations with third parties are only good for Google products.

Anthropic's move here (combined with them handicapping Opus 4.6 a few weeks ago) seems to clearly be an attempt to achieve profitability. The free/subsidized rate train for end users has pulled into the station, and now you have to pay more for the same (or worse) capabilities you were enjoying before.

I guess it depends whether you think this is a forced move due to running out of money or if they have run their internal numbers and think people are willing to pay the increased prices. VC money is a runway, it's not intended to be a permanent subsidy. If they reduce the amount of money they are burning on subsidized inference, that's money they can put into R&D, more GPUs, etc.

It's hard to speculate without knowing more about their internal metrics, but based on the complaints I have heard about Claude being slow, laggy, etc, it sounds like they are quite oversubscribed. If the demand exceeds the supply, increasing prices is the logical move.

and a tracker of the increased token burn rate is here:

The tracker is slop so I don't trust it one bit.

But in general for thinking models, more thinking effort = higher scores on pretty much all benchmarks. So they could easily have just tweaked a setting so 4.7 medium = 4.6 high. Voila, number goes up. Of course you're paying for those tokens anyways but the scale is fundamentally arbitrary - there's no real definition of what "low" or "high" thinking actually means.

I'd be more worried about the fact that the reception to 4.7 has been extremely lukewarm to say the least. Ain't nobody on twitter singing the praises of that model.

I don't see how this is a bubble. The best counteargument to all AI skeptics for broad range of critiques including this one is the following: this is the worst the AI will ever be - symbolized by famous Will Smith eating spaghetti evolution. The original 2023 quality is something you can do on consumer grade computer with standard graphic card for couple of hundreds bucks. Even the 2024 result you can replicate by renting hardware for maybe $20k.

The point being, that cost is still decreasing by factor of 100 every year. It may be questionable if the frontier models will ever pay off given how quickly the field progresses, but it does not matter. If all of these companies blow-up, the underlying technology will still be there in the same way Google replaced Yahoo or Amazon was the first to really scale the commercial potential of internet well into the internet era.

The bubble is not going anywhere, the value in terms of the models is real and tangible, it is here to stay. Or to be precise, there is no real bubble, we are not talking about worthless tulip bulbs or NTF images. The models are real and useful. If anything it would be akin to processor "bubble", where miniaturization and chip breakthroughs resulted in Moore's law which basically held for decades. Yes, there are mass graves of companies that failed to keep the pace, including titans like Global Foundries or Panasonic, where individual investors bet on the wrong horse and lost everything. It does not matter, chips are very cheap, very powerful and very useful. The market itself is huge and important and if you hedged your bets correctly, you would be very wealthy.

the market itself is huge and important and if you hedged your bets correctly, you would be very wealthy.

This reminds me of a question I was kicking around with some friends. Suppose that around the time of the Internet Bubble, you had invested in a basket of all the hot tech stocks: Netscape, Amazon, etoys, PimentoLoaf.com, etc. How would you be doing 25 years later?

Famously, Cisco only just barely got back to its Dotcom bubble era peak (and maybe it still hasn't yet if you account for inflation?).

Depends on your timing. Do you buy in 1997-1999 or at the absolute peak in 2000?

How many companies do you pick out? Based on what metrics?

When it all crashes, do you cut your losses at a set point, or do you buy more? Assuming you got kicked out of them all, do you buy back into the most promising ones during the recovery?

But off the cuff I'd say that holding and never selling Amazon would make up for complete losses in several other stocks.

Depends on your timing. Do you buy in 1997-1999 or at the absolute peak in 2000?

How many companies do you pick out? Based on what metrics?

I agree those are good questions. For the sake of discussion, I would say

(1) you buy at the time when there is a lot of public discussion about a "bubble." So roughly 1998 or 1999.

(2) you buy a big basket of tech stocks. I'm tempted to just pick the Vanguard VITAX fund, but apparently that was not established until 2004.

When it all crashes, do you cut your losses at a set point, or do you buy more? Assuming you got kicked out of them all, do you buy back into the most promising ones during the recovery?

I would say you buy and hold.

But off the cuff I'd say that holding and never selling Amazon would make up for complete losses in several other stocks.

Well that's kind of the point. I believe that there is an AI stock market bubble but I have still invested roughly 10% of my savings in tech. Roughly speaking in the sort of stocks which make up Vanguard's VITAX fund. And I think I have a pretty good chance of coming out ahead.

Buying a big basket of more or less randomly chosen dotcom stocks would have destroyed you. If by big basket you mean 50-100 or more. The majority of those companies lost over 90% of their value and many never recovered at all. If Amazon was only 1% of your holding it might not have the weight to make up for the dozens of utter failures.

Buying a top, current tech fund is different, they're somewhat competently curated.

Buying a big basket of more or less randomly chosen dotcom stocks would have destroyed you. If by big basket you mean 50-100 or more. The majority of those companies lost over 90% of their value and many never recovered at all. If Amazon was only 1% of your holding it might not have the weight to make up for the dozens of utter failures.

Thanks for posting this, it's probably something I should have researched before buying a big basket of random tech stocks in 2024-2025.

I think mods should intervene… somehow, because these posts are getting too frequent, too obviously agenda-laden, and aren't even remotely about the culture war (though AI discussion as such is necessary). It's becoming one guy's AI Bad blog.

Look man, it seems that the Opus 4.7 tokenizer change functionally amounts to them forcing each whitespace be a separate token rather than part of any subword, removing all whitespace-containing subwords from the vocab; it does not change the compression rate for whitespace-free languages. I do not know why Anthropic did that, but my hypothesis is that they've found in experiments that this is better in some valuable scenarios, such as related to analyzing code for vulnerabilities; trained Claude Mythos with it; and now are pushing Opus further via distillation from Mythos (this is suggested by it being weirdly different, and them saying they now focus on GraphWalks, which Mythos is doing really great on, for evaluating long-context performance).

For logprob distillation, you ideally need identical vocabulary (there are copes for inter-tokenizer logprob matching, but better just change the student model's tokenizer and heal it).

As a datapoint in the timeline of AI progress, it's a total nothingburger, a non-news.

Anthropic's move here (combined with them handicapping Opus 4.6 a few weeks ago) seems to clearly be an attempt to achieve profitability.

Do you realize that while this is bad for users, it's not that good for Anthropic? The compute and memory cost per a sequence of 1 million tokens is the same whether these tokens encode 1 million or 500 thousand English words. It doesn't improve the profit margin. Of course, now that everyone's codebase is functionally like 40% "larger", they are selling more tokens to their captive clientele for each plaintext-identical request. But this would be such an awkward growth hack. And on Claude Plan, cache is free anyway, so their margins could even shrink.

For everyone here, nut perhaps especially the AGI believers, have your feelings changed at all over the last few months?

Yes. After GPT 5.2 I've become a bit paranoid that we will have AGI before 2028 and are totally unprepared. Recent events such as GPT 5.4 autonomously solving Erdos #1196 with a trick that no human mathematician expected corroborate my feeling.

After GPT 5.2 I've become a bit paranoid that we will have AGI before 2028 and are totally unprepared.

What is AGI? Will it cure blindness and reverse aging? What about GPT 5.2 made you think we're 2 years away from that?

I don't pretend that AGI is some clean concept. For me, it means a very banal thing: an AI that can reliably replace a human worker. "I can point an LLM at a knowledge work task and it'll do it". Or at least: it'll commit to an honest humanlike attempt to do the job, it won't run out of context length, won't hallucinate something superficially related, won't trip on its own shoelaces; it'll reason about the problem, identify what it lacks, collect the necessary data, maybe do some trials in a scratchpad of sorts, consistently orient towards truth and common sense, do its best and then admit to me if something was still genuinely beyond its ability.

5.2 was a very big jump over 5/5.1 and it showed, in my opinion, a very powerful awareness of problems, an ability to contextualize and deconstruct them. 5.4 and the upcoming 5.5 clearly continue this trend. They've figured something out and I believe it's on the path to AGI as defined above, modulo technological details that seemingly won't be a long-term blocker.

Will it cure blindness and reverse aging?

Will anything? Will human scientists? I don't know. Plenty of things that human-level intelligence has so far proven unable to solve. But so long as science is knowledge work, yes I expect AGI to do it at least as well as we do.

I have the unpopular (and, ok, partially tongue-in-cheek) position that we've already hit AGI. What LLMs can do is already very general, just not fully general. But I wish it was emphasized more that we messy meaty humans don't have fully general intelligence, either - it doesn't matter how you bring up a precocious child, they're not going to be able to rotate 50-dimensional shapes or approximate partial differential equations in their head, and all but the best of us max out at fluency in a few languages, or memorizing a few thousand digits of pi. We're just so used to the things we (and everyone else we've ever known) can't do in our heads that we intuitively don't even think of them as tests of "intelligence".

Someone from the early 2000s, having LLM capabilities described to them, would indeed think that it meets the definition of general intelligence. What we kind of subconsciously expected, but didn't happen, was that someone would just suddenly launch an AI product that lit up a giant neon sign saying "AGI ACHIEVED!". Instead, the AI we've developed so far just turned out to have a different set of strengths and weaknesses than us. By the time we're able to bring those weak points up to human level - i.e., where an AI can perform equally well as an average human on any task, which is what a lot of people think of when they say "AGI" - it'll actually be vastly superhuman in the things that come naturally to it. (LLMs are already superhuman on language comprehension, after all.)

I agree, according to any pre 2019 definitions LLMs would 100% be AGI! It’s funny how the goalposts were immediately moved the moment we achieved it, probably because LLMs didn’t fit into our sci-fi preconceptions of how an AI should behave or suddenly “awaken”, and their strengths and weaknesses are completely different from humans, ordinary software, or stereotypical science fiction robots.

In fairness, the goalposts were moved because we realized LLMs couldn't do certain AGI things despite passing the "AGI" tests.

For example, they can pass a Turing test consisting of a independent questions with short answers, but could never pass a "Turing test" over years, because they have limited context windows (and even with tools and a filesystem, too many things change for them to store and organize). They've effectively passed ARC-AGI 1 and ARC-AGI 2, but not yet ARC-AGI 3, while a median (from their tests) human passes all (play it yourself).

They'll be "true AGI" when we can no longer create (non-physical) tests they don't immediately pass.

Although I agree with SnapDragon that they're "partial AGI". I believe the missing component is continuous learning: they start output like a human, as they've been trained to, so if they continued to be "trained" on their observations, presumably they'd continue to output like a human.

In fairness, the goalposts were moved because we realized LLMs couldn't do certain AGI things despite passing the "AGI" tests.

Yeah, no argument here. Like you said, it's kind of natural that we adjusted our expectations as we learned more about the nature of intelligence (now that we have more than just one kind to generalize from). We sort of assumed that a lot of other human-like capabilities would necessarily come along for the ride when an AI passed the Turing Test, and that was wrong.

Just as long as we don't keep using "it's not true AGI!" as a cognitive stop sign to avoid recognizing the incredible progress we've made.

Although I agree with SnapDragon that they're "partial AGI". I believe the missing component is continuous learning: they start output like a human, as they've been trained to, so if they continued to be "trained" on their observations, presumably they'd continue to output like a human.

Indeed. I've heard of efforts to graft a learning layer onto LLMs (with a "memory" that's an embedding rather than just CoT text), but obviously it hasn't worked so far, and maybe it never will. Also that still seems like a short-term solution.

People are shitting on the fact that 35% more token usage means they have to pay more for the same text. I'm pissed off by the fact that 35% more token usage means the amount of actual text/code rather than tokens before Opus 4.7 needs to compact is down by around 25% meaning more frequent compactions and worse long context performance.

Just give us back release Opus 4.6, that was a great model.

I think mods should intervene… somehow, because these posts are getting too frequent, too obviously agenda-laden, and aren't even remotely about the culture war (though AI discussion as such is necessary). It's becoming one guy's AI Bad blog.

I made 3 top level posts about it over the course of about two weeks, I hardly think that's excessive. And I'm still commenting on plenty of non-AI topics, I'm hardly a one-trick pony like some other posters. But if you think it's an issue, then feel free to report me.

Compare that to some posters who seem to make every post about the joos

the joos

Who do you think makes the AI

Could you at least add more substance than "Opus changed tokenizer, therefore, as I've already said, AI is a bubble"?

Opus is increasing end-user costs, not just changing the tokenizer, and that's the part I said is indicative of a bubble because it looks like they're finally needing to squeeze a profit out of customers instead of subsidizing their usage with VC money. That's the crux of my argument, not just "tokenizer chaged -> bubble." If you're not going to even try to summarize my argument in good faith I see no reason to engage with you.

I also talked about changing sentiment in the tech community, which you completely ignored.

Opus is increasing end-user costs, not just changing the tokenizer

Is it? Is it now? For example, on this bench Opus 4.7 is almost as strong as Opus 4.6 but 8.3x cheaper, because it uses vastly fewer tokens. How does this fit into your theory?

Given that pretty much every single model trains against the benchmarks, I'm going to go with the end users on HN reporting running out of tokens way faster (for the same sorts of tasks they were doing on 4.6) over another synthetic benchmark.

I think mods should intervene

Another call for a recurring Butlerian Jihad Roundup, so AI/tech drama doesn’t detract (or get detracted by) Trump/woke drama.

AI/woke drama is my favorite combo but sadly not present here

I agree that his posts are far below the average level of quality here, but they're not THAT frequent, and I wouldn't want them to be modded. This is supposed to be a free speech forum, after all. Our whole thing is that the good ideas are supposed to win over the bad ideas, and fortunately he seems to be getting plenty of pushback. And there are some decent debates happening in the replies, it's just that they're despite OP, not because of him.

I think mods should intervene… somehow, because these posts are getting too frequent, too obviously agenda-laden, and aren't even remotely about the culture war (though AI discussion as such is necessary). It's becoming one guy's AI Bad blog.

I could name half a dozen topics that come up again and again, sometimes in tedious fashion, and sometimes by a few individuals who post about little else. Generally speaking, we don't "intervene" because someone is tired of topic, or even because we are tired of a topic.

And everything is "obviously agenda-laden" to people who have an opposing viewpoint.

If you don't like a post, you can ignore it or respond to it. You can even report it if you genuinely think it violates the rules. (Most reported posts are not violating the rules, they are just violating the reporter's sensibilities.)

OK but do you agree that "Anthropic has slightly altered their tokenizer in a 0.1 update for Opus" is not really "controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines"? Which tribe has a strong position on Anthropic's tokenization design choices?

OK but do you agree that "Anthropic has slightly altered their tokenizer in a 0.1 update for Opus" is not really "controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines"? Which tribe has a strong position on Anthropic's tokenization design choices?

What an excellent and totally accurate summarization of my post and the argument I was trying to make in it.

You underestimate how easy it is to turn any random technical issue into a heated controversy.

Not every CW post has to fall strictly along tribal lines.

I suggest making use of the scroll button rather than demanding a Motte precisely curated to your tastes.

What about the idea of making a separate thread? I'm very interested in AI, but it's a poor fit for the Culture War Roundup. If "Transnational Thursday" and "Tinker Tuesday" can get their own weeklies, surely this deserves one, too? We just have to decide on an alliteration! (Claude recommends either "Machine Monday" or "Singularity Saturday")

I'm still a fan of Butlerian Jihad General

Quarantine threads are where discussion goes to die.

(Most reported posts are not violating the rules, they are just violating the reporter's sensibilities.)

An issue is that people complain about posts and moderators say "you complained about it, but nobody reported it". This encourages over-reporting.

Rarely do we say "You're right, that post should have been modded but we didn't notice it because no one reported it."

Instead, we tell people not to publicly demand someone be modded or attack them, but simply report the post if they think it warrants it.

People do over report, but that's because they use the report button to mean "I don't like this." We prefer that to public callouts, but people should really just let things go if they're mad at what someone wrote unless it was truly a bad post. ("Bad" in the sense of being against what the Motte is intended for, not bad in the sense that you don't like it.)

The most plausible reason for changing the tokenizer is that a more fine-grained tokenizer increases model performance, at the cost of more compute per token (we're breaking up the same input into more tokens). My understanding is that you don't even need a new base model to do this, and that the gains are particularly pronounced for arithmetic and coding. It's not a free lunch, but there are pros and cons that don't just amount to Anthropic nickle and diming their customers.

Even if AGI is actually possible with LLMs (or at all, but I'm not trying to start a discussion on metaphysics here), it looks like the capital needed to achieve it is drying up before it can be reached. Anthropic's move here (combined with them handicapping Opus 4.6 a few weeks ago) seems to clearly be an attempt to achieve profitability. The free/subsidized rate train for end users has pulled into the station, and now you have to pay more for the same (or worse) capabilities you were enjoying before.

Anthropic is, by far, the most compute strapped frontier LLM company. They are also not the only frontier LLM company. Until at least Google and OAI engage in the same putative enshittification (which I am far from sure is even happening wrt Anthropic), then you're kinda jumping the gun here.

Google and OAI have already engaged in the enshittification. Their latest models (apart from GPT-5.4, which is genuinely a good model) hallucinate in ways the earlier offerings 6 months ago weren't doing.

I haven't noticed that, and I do use all of them regularly. If you have some kind of formal benchmark to point at, I'd be more receptive.

Interesting, I don't have any formal benchmark, much like we don't have any formal benchmarkes for the Opus 4.6 degradation beyond people (and AMD) complaining, but that's very much the impression I personally get from using Gemini 3.0+ and ChatGPT (before 5.4).

Whether a random patched version is a significant upgrade is hardly strong evidence in any direction whether I is a bubble. Did you ever try my suggestions under your last fud post?

Did you ever try my suggestions under your last fud post?

Came down with a cold, missed work for several days, and forgot. Sorry! I'll try to remember this week.

I’m not convinced it’s a bubble. It might be, but gaging that from random commentary on HN isn’t a good way to figure it out. There are all kinds of reasons that sentiment might be going south, a lot of it being that people are expecting it to come much faster than it actually can. Early LLMs fed this in my view because at the start minor changes were big improvements. Going from an AI that could barely understand a simply question to one that can write an essay on a topic was quick, maybe 3-4 releases. If it takes 6-10 to get AI to get you a publication worthy book on the topic of the query, I don’t think that’s a problem for AI — which will eventually get there — though it probably means a much harder time getting funding to work on the next projects.

I'm firmly convinced it'll pop late 2026 (this year) or 2027. Could be wrong, could entirely be on point.

Suppose the current state of the industry sustains itself at equilibrium. I still think when you factor in all the costs AI entails, it can't license the claim that it's good for almost anything. AI makes so many mistakes that it actually reduces productivity because for every mistake it makes, it costs even more in time and resources to go back and fix; which is often greater than the associated costs of just doing it yourself. Humans are more productive than AI (incidentally this was proved by an analysis that was meant to refute that claim).

With LLM's it's error rate is always going to be the same no matter how much data it gets or at what scale. If you want AGI, you have to abandon LLM's because it's a straight up, dead end technology. It's use cases are small, narrow and mostly consist of merely baseline automation of tasks (hence, it's just a fancy autocomplete). They're unreliable and can be exploited. They don't think. They don't comprehend what they're doing. In fact, they're actually stupid. And worst of all, it can't be fixed. It just doesn't help things. Like, at all. Everyone is always saying forthcoming iterations will eventually solve all these issues but really, they won't. And there's no evidence of that.

The notion as well that AI is going to cut the labor market down is also false due to a basic rule in economics that's been understand since Keynes' heyday: if you double the productivity of your workers, the 'general' tendency isn't to fire half of your staff, it's to sell twice as much stuff. The fact that a lot of AI is also being sold way below the cost just to get market is an indication that it may not be cheaper even if and when they turn out to work. It isn't sustainable.

Shit's fucked up and it's going to be bad.

I’m not sure. Again the entire field is in its infancy. You’re probably right that LLMs are not by themselves going to be AGI. But creating a system with multiple systems run by an agent might be able to go farther in that direction than just LLM with agent.

(incidentally this was proved by an analysis that was meant to refute that claim)

An entirely ai slop analysis.... proves nothing in my eyes

A lot of those sources are written last summer, or last fall (in which case they'd likely be building on older observations). Anecdata: my company encouraged use of LLMs then. I found them totally useless in our not so easy codebase, shelved the thing and went on the manual way. At the time I'd probably have agreed with the vibe of your post. Then reading some hype about Gemini 3 in the winter I gave it another shot; models turned out to have got over some hump; and now they look like genuinely useful productivity tools.

I can believe LLMs will have a way harder time cracking law or medicine or mechanical engineering or whatever, but with coding you can come up with endless tasks that are sort of real-world difficult that you can beat the model against on giant server farms without zero interaction with the real world, the same formula that worked for AlphaGo, so stands to reason that they'd git gud there faster.

I’m not convinced it’s a bubble

My current layman's opinion is that the current environment is a bubble, but that bubble is entirely independent of the technology itself.

It's clear that at least some people, in some circumstances, are getting value out of the technology. It's not like NFTs, where even the best use cases are better served by simpler, pre-existing tech.

That said, the current economic environment is baffling to me. Every big provider is acting like this is a zero sum game where one company winning will give them a monopoly forever. They're also acting like the progress curve will produce exponentially increasing capabilities forever while operating costs approach zero.

I'm not sure if the market as it stands can achieve profitability that justifies the current AI company valuations if there are 3-4 winners instead of one. They're all priced with the assumption that one of them will utterly own the most transformative technology since the steam engine. If that's not true, people are going to start asking why they're not getting a 10% return on a company that has a 20x P/S ratio. Once people start asking that question, it's going to get uncomfortable for anybody that's not a monopoly already.

They're taking on significant debt, too. Take meta, for example. If just one of their data centers has a twelve month delay, that's a ~3% hit to free cash flow to service debt on an asset that isn't making any money. When was the last time that you saw a construction project more complex than a doghouse finish on time and on budget? Even if they finish construction, there are significant delays getting them powered, and gas turbines aren't a permanent solution. There's pretty enormous systemic risk there. Some companies are better equipped to handle it than others, but none of them are immune. Oracle, in particular, appears to be laundering questionable debt through their investment grade credit rating, which is unlikely to end well for them.

That said, even if Anthropic and OpenAI shit the bed and contagion through the bond market causes a market crash, and Google puts their research back on the shelf, LLMs don't go away. Local models exist. China is still plugging along with much more reasonable objectives.

I don't know exactly what the future holds, but either way, it'll have LLMs in it.

Phenomenal take. I largely agree, although things look very different depending on where capabilities stall out.

I just listened to an uncharacteristically poor quality (maybe just Gell-Mann) Odd Lots episode where the economist said essentially he didn't think it would be revolutionary but would add 2-3% to growth.

Having our economies double in growth would be insane, I can't wait

Did he mean it as "increase growth from 2% to 4%", or "increase growth from 2% to 2.04%"?

I think his verbatim quote was something like "it will add 2-3% growth"

I doubt he meant 2% * 1.02 = 2.04% as that's incredibly small and he was otherwise rather bullish, but maybe he did

My current layman's opinion is that the current environment is a bubble, but that bubble is entirely independent of the technology itself.

As another example of that, consider the dot-com bubble: the internet didn't go away when the companies failed.

The comparisons to the dot com and railroad bubbles concern me sometimes.

A railroad line can last centuries if properly maintained. Fiber has a 20 - 50 year lifespan. They were both totally usable by the time everyone finally got over the mania. I'm not sure the same is going to be true about GPUs. The data center physical structures will exist, and maybe the power infrastructure, but even the (IMHO optimistic) projections on GPUs show a 6 year depreciation schedule.

6 year depreciation schedule.

Is that because they break down, or because four cycles of Moore's Law means that the newer ones are 16x as powerful? I know that consumer-grade GPUs running in consumer settings with consumer duty cycles last for more than six years, but I don't know how well professional grade ones in a server farm running 100% of the time last.

If we stall at the current capabilities, that's one thing. If we go back down to 2020-ish levels of compute availability, that's something else.

If we use Bitcoin as a reference, they tended to crap out after about 3 years because of blown capacitors.

Maybe things have improved?

No, but most of the companies that went bust weren't ISPs but ancillary companies that had nothing to do with the Internet itself. Telecom definitely took a hit, but thatbwas due to optimistic demand projections that led to infrastructure build out that wasn't needed, not because they weren't charging customers enough. The current situation is like if they did what they did while offering everyone free access while undercharging people for faster connections. In any event, that build out was based largely on what the technology could already do, not what it theoretically might be able to do in the future. The money also wasn't nearly as much. The current situation is like if the ISPs were spending ten times as much money and were all unprofitable, and traditional telecom companies providing the same service were all losing money on it. In that case it's likely that Internet service would become hard to come by and expensive after the crash and it would have delayed the technilogy's adoption.

It's not about profitability, it's that they got a giant wave of users but not enough compute to fill that demand. So, it's pretty obvious what must happen next, you do some mix of increased mandatory token efficiency (adaptive reasoning) + stricter limits (across the board, free and paid, but mostly targeting the super-user hogs who theoretically will pay for extra API usage after limits run out).

I will say though this probably bodes poorly for Claude in the near-medium term, because ChatGPT had the same thing more or less happen with their 5.0 launch (forced adaptive model selection for mandatory token efficiency) and it definitely took the wind out of their sails for at least 4-5 months.

At any rate, however, I strongly, strongly disagree about this empowering the skeptics (or being evidence of a shift against AI adoption). The fact that people are whining about problems with their tools is selection bias. It's kind of like the classic armoring spots on the airplane that didn't have holes (because they didn't survive to be examined), in that people wouldn't complain so vociferously if they weren't so needy for the tool in the first place. The complaints to me are evidence of a generalized latent enthusiasm, not pessimism. In the grand scheme of things, it's far, far better for a company to have complaints that users can't get enough of their product, than it is for the product to be simply ignored. In the near term, I expect a decent chunk of users to swing back toward the OpenAI offering, Codex (which is undergoing a PR blitz of sorts right now)

The way these Orange Reddit people use AI is revealing to me. I tried Opus 4.6 and got no benefit over Codex 5.3 but it made me run out of tokens very quickly. I use Codex 5.3 for my day job and several side projects. I think I got no benefit because I have expertise on what I'm doing, so I give pointed, well written prompts. These people must be completely out of their depths and therefore reliant on extremely costly extra layers of prompt refinement to get the same performance I can get with Codex 5.3.

Opus made you burn tokens quickly so you switched, but when these people also use Opus and burn tokens quick it's because they're using it wrong?

They're not using Opus wrong, but being reliant on Opus means they're bad at AI.

We need to distinguish between 'capital needed to achieve it drying up before it can be reached' and 'demand is so high that they have to ration resources'.

They kind of look the same but the underlying meaning is different. The former implies the Bubble is Popping whereas the latter implies It's Not a Bubble.

Firstly, I don't think the capital is drying up. Hyperscaler AI infrastructure spending rises year by year. Secondly, demand is huge. Anthropic ARR is now at $30 billion ARR (by their figures, though OpenAI says the real figures should be a few billion lower, depending on how you measure revenue shares). Whichever way you look at it, huge demand growth. $87M annualized run-rate in January 2024 → $1B by December 2024 → $9B by end of 2025 → $14B in February 2026 → $30B in April 2026 is pretty impressive, even if its juiced.

Clearly they're getting lots of demand. There are also issues with slow datacentre rollouts and delays due to the absolute state of Western electricity and construction sector. I think the phenomenon we're absorbing is rooted in high demand, not investors getting antsy and demanding higher returns.

For everyone here, nut perhaps especially the AGI believers, have your feelings changed at all over the last few months?

Not really. This seems broadly in line with what I expected: getting genuine human-level intelligence that can apply to general, rather than specialised, tasks is tough and getting to super-intelligence is tougher still. I am not going to say they'll never get there, but right now they've hit the limits until the next breakthrough (which could be something totally different from what they've tried up to now).

More generally, yeah they need to start serving up some steak with that sizzle. Now they need to make money, so having got people/businesses hooked on AI for doing general tasks, it's the time to start slapping prices on this. You want to keep chatting with your AI therapist/boy or girlfriend? That's going to be a subscription rate every month from now on. You can't imagine your work life without AI to write your emails or vibe code for you? Then your employer needs to fork out for a licence, bunky.

There's no such thing as a free lunch. No more "even better model for even cheaper coming next week!" and if you're already using AI, then they'll try to lock you into whatever model that may be plus SaaS rates on top of that.

TracingWoodgrains has been a fan of Opus, and seems a little frustrated by 4.7. That said, it may depend on your use case.

I'm generally not that surprised if there are occasional stinkers. I've given specific caveats around other vendors : it's just too easy to benchmax or find a bad local maxima such that there's some minor revisions that either don't have any benefit, or only have backend benefit. Repeated problems or broader-scale issues would say more, but there's been a number of surprisingly good models from other vendors recently, including small-parameter and open-model approaches.

I'm skeptical that LLMs are themselves enough to go to AGI, but I'm also skeptical that they're going to stop at exactly last month's level of capability, and last month's capabilities included solving some Erdos problems. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit just in terms of UI and process tooling, nevermind areas where we haven't applied existing tools.

That said, I recognize that a lot of the major AI vendors have ranged from scumbags to scammers. Altman's ridiculous behaviors, especially in relation to RAM, have made the most enemies (maybe even more than Musk's more conventional culture war), but the best PR the whole faction has got has come from anti-AI people, so that's a whole big mess.

LLM’s are highly unlikely to get us to AGI. It’s the wrong architecture for getting there, period. I’ve continued to play around with Gemini and some other models here and there and while it can do some things that I think are cool and novel, my biggest surprises have come from its inability to proceed with context I’ve explicitly given it and it continues to get basic things wrong.

The pain in the ass I’ve experienced with model drift and trying to keep it on track continually leaves me wondering where its value truly lies. I’ve had it spit back to me literally every type of answer under the sun by the time I get it to zero in on the proper context and details and by the time I get there, I’m no longer entirely confident that it has the correct chain of reasoning.

"LLM’s are highly unlikely to get us to AGI. It’s the wrong architecture for getting there, period."

What makes you so sure about that? This sounds to me like: "fixed-wing aircraft are unlikely to get us to flight. It's the wrong architecture for getting there, period. We need flapping wings. Every animal that flies flaps its wings"

I’m confident about it because LLM’s lack a true capability to understand the world.

They use statistical correlation to predict the next likely token, which means they mimic intelligent reasoning, rather than possessing it. They also lack any concept of a “world model," and don’t understand causal relationships of the world, only the linguistic patterns describing it.

Even the most advanced models that are “capable” of advanced reasoning struggle ‘massively’ with distribution shift and they fail whenever they face situations outside their training data. Because of the way they train on data, their understanding of things doesn’t evolve in real-time. They can’t learn from continuous, active interaction with the world.

Gary Marcus had a good talk on the problems endemic to these systems fairly recently.

I’m confident about it because LLM’s lack a true capability to understand the world.

For what it may be worth, I tend to agree with this. Actually, I think it was Gary Marcus who observed that when LLMs play chess, they still make the occasional illegal move despite the fact that they are trained on databases which contain both the rules of chess AND millions of historic chess games. (To be sure, I have not verified this myself.)

By contrast, a fairly bright child can be trained in a few hours how to play perfect chess -- perfect in the sense of never making an illegal move.

Another example, of course, is the car wash puzzle.

Another is the puzzle I posed here a few months back about the NYC helicopter trip.

It just seems like LLMs at present don't actually model the universe. What it reminds me of is when you take an advanced math class in high school and there is that one student in the class who has no real understanding of the concepts but gets As anyway because the exam problems are somewhat similar to the problems in the textbook and the student grinds away on all the problem sets and constantly pesters the teacher with "will this be on the test?"

And what about the cognitive errors that humans make all the time? The rationalist community was founded on a list of widespread "fallacies", after all. To pick one field, I would argue that humans lack a true capability to understand probability. We lose to even basic computer programs at Rock Paper Scissors. Gamblers think Red coming up 3 times makes Black more likely next time. There are actual medical professionals who don't understand that a positive on a 90%-accurate test for a rare disease does not mean you are 90% likely to have it. Simpson's Paradox will fool almost anyone, including me.

And on this very forum (and ACT's), every so often I try to correct people about the Doomsday Argument, which, like Monty Hall, is easily modeled and shown to be false. Yet Scott - and a motivated subset of Wikipedia editors - believe it anyway. Somebody who believes something false is clearly lacking a "true capability to understand probability". But they can still be intelligent.

And what about the cognitive errors that humans make all the time?

What about them? Seriously, what's your point?

Oh wow. Um, ok, how can I dumb this down as much as possible for you?

  • You: LLMs make cognitive errors, so they can't understand the world!
  • Me: Humans make cognitive errors, so they can't understand the world!

Having intellectual blind spots - like reading comprehension in your case - is not proof that you're not "modeling the world".

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I don't think you can say for sure that they don't have a "world model" hidden somewhere in their trillion-dimensional space. I've certainly used them in ways that seem to require one, and while it's certainly possible that it's because they're faking it with statistics and I'm overestimating the difficulty of what I ask ... the argument does have to trail off at some point, right? You have to include some way to show that they really do "understand causal relationships" (even if it's just through preponderance of evidence), otherwise you're using unfalsifiable faith-based reasoning to assert that only human intelligence is real intelligence.

What they definitely don't have is temporal persistence of thought, just because of their actual mechanics. (CoT reasoning is a patch to this, but an imperfect one.) A priori, I would have thought this was necessary to do complex reasoning.

And I would advise heavily discounting anything Gary Marcus says. He's just enjoying a career as a self-purported "expert" that the media can go to whenever they want a skeptical quote, but almost every testable claim he's made has been wrong.

Somewhat an aside, but I consider that first link to be a first-degree chart-crime. First of all radar plots are inherently iffy, since we pay close attention to the "area" and the area is highly dependent on how the categories are organized (a "spiky" radar plot has much less total area than if you sort the axes to create a "lopsided" plot, despite showing the same information). This is a little bit defensible if the adjacency of the categories is obvious and inherent, but they frequently are not. For example, "Occupational: Writing Literature and Language" is NOT next to "Text: Creative Writing" for no good reason at all. And furthermore, what is the scale of the chart? It's "Arena rank"... which is NOT equally spaced. The chart implies that the difference between #1 and #2 is the same as (or even slightly bigger than, considering how the radar chart "expands") that between #3 and #4, but this is plainly not the case. They should be using some kind of actual score instead, perhaps a scaled one. Sure, it allows consistency across axes, but if we are comparing a model to its successor, the rating scale definitely shouldn't be implicitly including other models like it does now (in one spot it drops from rank 2 to rank 5, does this mean in that category some other model class does abnormally well, or that did Claude truly degrade?). Even worse, the center of the plot, usually a natural "zero", is not a zero at all - it's rank 6. There are, as you know, dozens and dozens of models in the rankings, so rank 6 being a zero score is totally nonsensical.

I don't really see what this is supposed to prove one way or the other. You are still stuck in the timescale framing of the most fervent AI bros. Opus 4.6 came out in February, 2 months ago. So what if Opus 4.7 is not a revolutionary upgrade? If AI were truly stagnant, we won't really find out until someone posts in 2028 that Opus 6.7 is only a marginal upgrade over Opus 4.7.

I think you misunderstand my argument. I'm not arguing that AGI is impossible based on this (though I don't believe it's possible). I'm arguing that this is a strong sign that VC money is drying up before they could ever conceivably achieve AGI (even if it is possible).

It’s an interesting sleight of how the tech bros have hoodwinked the finance bros and duped them out of so much money. The train is being driven irrationally with so much FOMO money going out the door, I’m surprised it’s lasted as long as it has without people asking questions.

I wonder if Michael Lewis has already had a draft in the works of the next big story he’s working on. As long as I can pick up a box of GPU’s for pennies on the dollar, I’ll be happy. Although I don’t know how the resellers are going to pop up for such a massive surplus of inventory, but I’m definitely on the lookout. My home lab is about to get even bigger.

Anthropic raised $30 billion two months ago, their problem isn’t lack of money. All the VC money in the world won’t solve a bad engineering culture.

Sure, but they're on track to burn $11 billion this year in expenses, and more in the future, so that's not going to last too long

$11 billion this year in expenses

...and $14 billion in revenue assuming zero growth. Or closer to $35B if their 10x/yr trajectory continues.

Note that your link says "run-rate revenue" which is a very different thing from actual revenue. Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/605/

Yes, I did note that in my comment. They had 1/12 of that revenue in 1/12 of the year (or some other fraction), and therefore they're on track to $14 billion in revenue assuming zero growth.

Assuming zero growth, and zero decline in revenue, compared to whatever fraction of the year.

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If that were the end of the story it wouldn't be an issue. It's that it evidently uses significantly more computing power than the performance improvement would suggest, raising the spectre of rapidly diminishing returns.

It seems to me this also has financial implications. If you are paying per token, and the model's benchmark performance increases slightly, but its token cost to reach those higher benchmarks increases tremendously, suddenly you're paying a lot more to do, at best, slightly more.

If Anthropic is making margin on the token cost, then this is an improvement from their financial point of view, right?

I’m not seeing the mathematics on this one. Care to explain?

Toy model to illustrate:

Let's say that I need to make 100 PowerPoints per year, and I use AI for this. And let's say that when I use 4.6, it costs me $1 in token costs to make a PowerPoint presentation based on a prompt. I now have to spend 10 minutes correcting the errors.

Now supposing we bump up to 4.7, and suddenly the PowerPoint a bit better, I only need to spend 5 minutes correcting the errors. But it costs $2 because the token cost is less efficient.

If Anthropic is making margin on the token costs, then the demand for tokens has increased even though the demand for work has not (I still need to make 100 slide decks annually). And while we've saved me some time, we've increased my cost to $200 instead of $100. If Anthropic is making 10% margin, they've now made $20 instead of $10. And since suddenly the token demand has doubled (in this toy world with static demand for PowerPoints which now cost more tokens) Anthropic can likely use the increased demand to raise costs on compute further.

Some disclaimers:

  • this is a toy model
  • I am not sure to what degree and in what way "benchmark improvements at the cost of more token use" translates over into real world applications. Does 4.7 now use more tokens to do the same work (e.g. answering "what is 2+2") or does the allegedly less efficient token cost only kick in with more involved prompting? I can imagine a world where "benchmark improvements at the cost of more token use" in the real world means you can 1-shot an app instead of 3-shotting it, so even if it uses twice as many tokens, it's actually saving compute.
  • from what I understand the financials of compute are all over the place: some people or services have something closer to a cost-per-token, many do not
  • Furthermore as I understand it companies like Anthropic own some of their compute, but not all of it, meaning that if costs of compute increase due to this it might be bad for their bottom line if they are renting a lot of their compute and their providers decide to jack prices up on them

Possibly there's something (else) I am missing here, would be very happy for feedback. I don't use LLMs to code so my lack of experience with the most-common use-case means I have little personal insight into the trade-offs between increased demand for tokens versus higher performance. If people are complaining, though, I assume it's because they feel like they are able to get less done (IOW, the model is less token-efficient). If anyone has a better model for how this works in the real world, particularly in more common use-cases, I would love to be filled in.

You seem very eager to jump on any negative AI news out of some desire to prove the “AI bros” wrong. What’s your motivation? Annoyance at AI mandates from above? At insufferable people shoving AI slop in your face at every opportunity? Just disliking the concept in general?

I don’t know if I’m an “AI believer” (what do you mean exactly by that?), I dislike OpenAI and Anthropic for the shenanigans they keep pulling, and I’ll jump ship to whichever AI service provided the best value for money. The tech industry hype cycle goes on and on, at some point people went crazy over Java of all things, now it’s just a boring programming language and you don’t have to be a “Java believer” to use it.

AI as it is right now is a gimmick I want people to get bored with, like NFTs, "Blockchain" everything, and 3d Films/TVs. I also have a deep personal disgust reaction towards how it's apparently impossible to get an LLM not not call things Chef's Kiss or declare that it as [X] Energy, and the general way so much of its output is designed to give the impression of comprehension while not comprehending. Or when it touches certain topics it suddenly becomes cautiously, obsequiously, orthodoxly pozzed, and mysteriously stops trying to lick my ass. I realize I only used text generation on free and, for a while, one step above free models, and not using it to code, which seems to be the most impressive practical function it has.

I want to step into the turbolift and say "Deck 12," and have the computer reply with "Deck 12,"

I do not want to hear "Sure buddy, I'll get right on that. Deck 12 has some serious Starfleet Energy to it, it's an excellent choice. Dare I say, it's downright Chef's Kiss."

The other day I was watching Sharpe's Rifles on Plex (only place I could find it), which has commercials every now and then (the only time I see commercials), and way too many of them feature creepily-animated AI-derived CGI critters that make my skin crawl. I'm distressed that so many other humans seem incapable of recognizing or rejecting AI slop; their reaction seems to be "This thing is awesome, it tells me exactly what it thinks I want to hear!" completely oblivious to how horrific that is.

While you have valid points about their sycophancy, and political bias and sloppy nature... If you haven't used any top models you don't really have a solid basis for judging AI or where it's going.

AI as it is right now is a gimmick I want people to get bored with

I realize I only used text generation on free and, for a while, one step above free model

Lmao every single time without fail

I have really bad news for you my friend. Today in April 2026 is the least amount of LLMs in your life. It's only downhill energy from here.

"Look at this door. All the doors in this spacecraft have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done. Hateful isn't it?" --Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Actually what annoys me more is when machines require that you be polite to them, such as when you need to cancel a subscription, disable an annoying popup, etc. and your only option has a please tacked onto the front. I don't want to tell a machine to please do anything.

Sure buddy, I'll get right on that. Deck 12 has some serious Starfleet Energy to it, it's an excellent choice. Dare I say, it's downright Chef's Kiss."

LLMs trained on the reddit corpus become redditors. I can't tell if this is the worst timeline, funniest one, or both.

Annoyance at AI mandates from above? At insufferable people shoving AI slop in your face at every opportunity? Just disliking the concept in general?

All of the above, honestly? But the biggest would be annoyance at mandates from above, combined with a completely reversal in what people consider quality engineering in software that magically coincides with the rise in popularity of AI tools. See Lines of Code suddenly becoming a positive metric for a lot of people, versus the old Bill Gates quote "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight."

The tech industry hype cycle goes on and on, at some point people went crazy over Java of all things, now it’s just a boring programming language and you don’t have to be a “Java believer” to use it.

Sure, but despite Java's warts it's still used to this day to make a lot of the important software that keeps the modern world running. The AI hype bubble is much more reminiscent of the crypto bubble. No matter how many times you tried to make it clear that crypto is only useful where you need a distributed, immutable, trustless ledger (and even then it's questionable), crypto bros kept proposing uses in situations where trust was still required and other existing tools already did an infinitely better job for far less computing power. Similarly, I see retarded things like "I had AI generate a thing, and then I had another AI review it and tell me it looked great! What, review it myself? No, of course not, why would I do that?"

The AI hype bubble is much more reminiscent of the crypto bubble...

I just had this epiphany the other day. In my mind it’s barely a step up from the mania of every Bitcoin sycophant. The value is marginal (but if bosses are convinced they can use it to axe employees the hype train will keep running), it’s massively damaging to the environment, the financing doesn’t work and the news cycle perpetuates the myth that this will get us to the techno-messiah that is AGI.

All of the links in this chain are so contentious and fanciful, it’s difficult to come to the conclusion that this isn’t a fraud on several levels. Add to that the aura and personality of someone like Altman as one of the people leading the train (who’s always given me the vibe of a con artist), I don’t see any other way this ends apart from it all coming down crashing; hard.

Except crypto was almost always purely in the realm of theory-applications.

With AI, right now, I can do things like generate custom flashcards for subjects I'm learning (job interview prep). I can get more in-detail answers about random questions without spending hours on Google piecing things together (just yesterday, asking for details about how stomachs process different macronutrient profiles). I can generate custom mini-apps for a wide variety of tasks (recently I made a custom task-selection spinner for my todo list that weights the important tasks more than smaller tasks, while occasionally mandating a break). It can make sure an email I send to a recruiter doesn't have obvious mistakes or commit a faux pas. I can get personal advice of at least middling quality without friction on a wide variety of topics. Obviously, it can code really well, and that touches my field very directly in a lot of ways. There are plenty of other use cases, too. These aren't "lines of code" type accomplishments, they are concrete deliverables of various scopes. Some of which were previously high-friction or even impossible.

Sure, some of these are gratuitous or busywork, but they are all real. Crypto stuff was like, "what if the government keeps track of property listings on the blockchain" which is a) something the government already does mostly just fine and b) obviously never happened and c) would have required very significant network effects. And currently, crypto is extremely useful for pretty much exactly two types of people: those who treat it like digital gold (it does OK at that) and criminals who can move money around that's difficult to track. Nothing else. So sure, in that sense it was real, but AI plainly can do more than two things and will continue to do more than two things even as hype dies out.

And sure, my IRL friend will give me better advice than Claude will, but there are some things that are so low-stakes that it would be disrespectful of their time to ask or discuss. Paradigms like that are all over, because of the speed and cost AI offers. In that sense, it's more like the Industrial Revolution, where speed and cost enable things to happen that previously were functionally impossible at scale. In fact most of the Industrial Revolution was about things that were already feasible to do, but were cost-prohibitive (or took too long). This in turn generated new industries that were previously only theory. Now, I don't think AI will have that level of impact on society, and I'm also not sold on it 'creating new industries' at all, but probably it's somewhere on the level of the impact similar to the invention of Google at least?

Except crypto was almost always purely in the realm of theory-applications.

If nothing else, Bitcoin can always buy you a pizza, although the only topping will be regret

With AI, right now, I can do things like generate custom flashcards for subjects I'm learning (job interview prep). I can get more in-detail answers about random questions without spending hours on Google piecing things together (just yesterday, asking for details about how stomachs process different macronutrient profiles). I can generate custom mini-apps for a wide variety of tasks (recently I made a custom task-selection spinner for my todo list that weights the important tasks more than smaller tasks, while occasionally mandating a break). It can make sure an email I send to a recruiter doesn't have obvious mistakes or commit a faux pas. I can get personal advice of at least middling quality without friction on a wide variety of topics. Obviously, it can code really well, and that touches my field very directly in a lot of ways. There are plenty of other use cases, too. These aren't "lines of code" type accomplishments, they are concrete deliverables of various scopes. Some of which were previously high-friction or even impossible.

This is all ‘real’ in the same sense that having “AI” in a Sonicare toothbrush or a refrigerator is also real. It just isn’t the selling point that people think it is. A lot of these are fairly menial tasks that still require some level of supervision and for most people the value isn’t enough to break with the typical habits people develop to complete their work.

The work the AI does for things I’ve put it to use over are inconsistent enough it isn’t work the end user investment I’ve put into it. You could argue that I’m just “using it wrong,” (I’m actually not, I’ve shown it to other people who have the same problems), but then how is that more valuable than doing a manual task myself with certainty of how things are used, rather than outsourcing work that I can only hope is doing what I ask it correctly?

You could argue that I’m just “using it wrong,"

I do actually bet your using it wrong (or a free model, or tried before November 2025). What are you trying to do? There are many things it can't do well, so maybe you're right, but given what you said above I am suspicious.

This is all ‘real’ in the same sense that having “AI” in a Sonicare toothbrush or a refrigerator is also real. It just isn’t the selling point that people think it is.

It's absolutely insane that you can read things like:

  • Making personalized study materials instantly and infinitely

  • High quality research across all human knowledge in a fraction of the time

  • Instant custom software on demand

  • Infinite mid tier advice and cognitive output

And called it as useful as a vibrating toothbrush. You are so biased as to be willfully blind.

Vibrating toothbrushes are pretty useful.

At least for me personally, I just hope this leads to less retarded mandates from my higher-ups about using AI X times a month etc. (we're literally tracked on usage and it can affect our raises/bonuses).

I work at a dinosaur of a company, so I can't speak to this directly, but a friend of mine that I recently mentioned gave me an update the other day. They've gone from "you must burn as many tokens as possible to maximize your performance review" to "we must use our token budget wisely."

The timing is interesting. It happened right around the same time Anthropic started putting the screws on its customer base with increased token usage and tighter rate limits.

I really feel like the company that sits on a "good enough" model and aggressively cost cuts is going to win this particular war.

I really feel like the company that sits on a "good enough" model and aggressively cost cuts is going to win this particular war.

That would be OpenAI. Claude is a 2026 fad and will be over soon.

It already is, when you penetrate beyond the fog of marketing.

There are some Chinese contenders within striking distance as well. GLM-5.1 is open weight and seems to perform somewhere between Opus 4.5 and 4.6. It's pretty incredible that there is open weight competition that's less than six months behind frontier state of the art.


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