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AI bros still in shambles, news at 7.
A few weeks ago, Anthropic made a post about their new model, Mythos. As has been done by other members of the AI industry as far back as the release of GPT 2, the creators of it said it was too dangerous to release. The headline feature of Mythos, at least as described by Anthropic, was not code generation. Instead, they specifically hyped it as the most amazing thing ever for finding security vulnerabilities in code.
Several people, including here on this forum, shared the hype. As usual, I remained unconvinced. I've mentioned elsewhere that I don't think AIs are inherently incapable of finding security vulnerabilities in code, my main skepticism is that they will generate lots of false positives in the process that will make them a lot less useful than the companies selling them have advertised. And more importantly, I think they are currently incapable of designing and maintaining any significant projects that go beyond a basic bitch CRUD application or things of that sort. I'm also skeptical that there is all that much room for growth or improvement beyond their current capabilities, for a number of reasons that I won't get into right now.
But enough about my opinions, I'm just a retarded code monkey doing API integrations for boring tax software. Enter Daniel Stenberg, the creator and maintainer of curl. For those who don't know, if you have a program or library that makes HTTP requests, there is an extremely high likelihood that it is using curl under the hood. It's basically one of the foundational pieces of modern digital infrastructure, a "project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003", as XKCD might put it: https://xkcd.com/2347/
Stenberg/curl was one of the projects that was offered early access to Mythos. However despite being promised access initially, it took several weeks to get it. And even then he suddenly was no longer being offered direct access, but was offered to have someone else run Mythos against his codebase for him and to then share the results with him. This is a big red flag for me, because if Mythos does actually generate a lot of noise/false positives, it would make sense that Anthropic would want to hide that by running it themselves as many times as they could until it actually generated some real, actionable results.
In any case, the results that Stenberg got back were underwhelming. Mythos claimed to have identified 5 vulnerabilities. After investigating all of them, Stenberg and his team determined that only one of those was a vulnerability, and a low severity one at that. In Stenberg's own words: "curl is certainly getting better thanks to this report, but counted by the volume of issues found, all the previous AI tools we have used have resulted in larger bugfix amounts."
Most damning from Stenberg is this: "My personal conclusion can however not end up with anything else than that the big hype around this model so far was primarily marketing. I see no evidence that this setup finds issues to any particular higher or more advanced degree than the other tools have done before Mythos. Maybe this model is a little bit better, but even if it is, it is not better to a degree that seems to make a significant dent in code analyzing."
So I'm asking @self_made_human and others who seem more on-board with the AI hype train: does this report from a knowledgeable and experienced developer change your opinions on the future trajectory of AI at all?
Full article by Stenberg can be found here:
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/05/11/mythos-finds-a-curl-vulnerability/
For the record, while I appreciate the name-drop, I've largely checked out of this debate. I read the article when it crossed HN, which I browse daily. The strongest critique of Mythos is that GPT 5.5 Pro reaches similar benchmarks while being cheaper and generally available. Which is to say: Mythos isn't quite as special as Anthropic would like, because a competing frontier model already demonstrates equivalent capabilities. See the problem there? Or, from my vantage point, the absence of one?
Why so checked out?
Not because I've recanted, and not because I've stopped believing my own forecasts. It's that anyone who hasn't gotten the memo by now is beyond my ability to help. I've been on this beat for years, sounding the alarm for about as long. Litigating whether each fresh data point lands above or below the trendline has stopped feeling like a useful expenditure of my evenings. I still have the arguments cocked and loaded, still bookmark whatever catches my eye, with roughly the clinical curiosity of an ICU physician watching creatinine and urea climb and eGFR slide in a patient with end-stage renal disease. Erdos problems falling like dominos and Terence Tau watching from the sidelines, Tim Gowers writing up breakthroughs from OpenAI's unreleased general-purpose models, METR's task-horizon metrics snapping like a mediocre school psychologist trying to score Einstein on the Stanford-Binet. (At some point the instrument stops measuring the subject and starts measuring its own inadequacy.)*
TL;DR: my supply of fucks is running thin. If you're pinging me hoping to extract an argument about AI capabilities, calibrate accordingly. I've got bigger fish to fry before I get thrown into the fryer myself. Good luck to whoever still has the energy for it.
*Go ask ChatGPT for citations and actual links.
Can you post to some of your forecasts? I know that you are bullish on the tech - but my vague impression was that they survived a sanity check - aka were not like the wet nightmares of AI2027
My current timelines (stable for the last year or two) are 50% odds of AGI by 2030, 70% by 2033.
My operational definition of AGI is "can do ~everything a human can with a computer as well or better than the the median human", ideally a 130 IQ human. That focuses on real world tasks, and also considers speed and reliability. I consider ASI achieved when the models reliably beat the smartest humans alive at similar or lower figures for $/unit of cognitive output.
In other words, if you attach my version of AGI to a computer with access to the internet it can do anything a human could with the same affordances, about as well. Probably with a video feed and a virtual keyboard or mouse, but that's not a big deal. Current models are too spiky in terms of capabilities to count, particularly when it comes to agentic workflows like simply using vision and direct input to get tasks done. I can't solve an Erdos problem even if you give me 5 years to prepare, but I can do more with my desktop PC than Claude can, at least much faster.
I expect that the temporal delta from that version of AGI to true ASI is going to be rather short. Maybe a year or two, medium confidence guess.
So pretty mild stuff, although I do find your definition of AGI/ASI somewhat texas sharpshooter style. On the other hand no one seems to have to be able to define those things in a way that is better so there's that.
It's interesting times when I'm told that my forecasting of a 50% chance of AI becoming human-parity or better in 4 years is described as a tame take. Not complaining, just observing things with grim resignation. I'll know AGI is here when I see it, or a few years later, if unemployed.
I wish I'm wrong, and that I had been wrong so far. It's no fun engaging in arguments where you want your opponents to win.
The whole of civilization and industrialization has been underpinned by using energy to achieve superhuman feats. Most of the worries so far about AI are thin veil for some people's fear that their greatest labor asset will lose value rapidly. And probably some narcissistic injury if we are using LP definitions.
If I didn't get worried that we created cars that could run 20 times faster than a human 24/7 or that we have trivialized the magic of flying to the point that it is utterly trivial, boring and so on, why should I worry that some machine will think better than me. Hell - I should be worried if we don't invent such a machine. Whatever you can think of - we are running out of it - out of soil, out of biomass, out of oil. We need faster science progression to get out of the trap that is our lovely blue planet.
And your predictions are tame because they fit linear advancement at current rates. And we will probably get there even on log. Your definition of AGI is modest.
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