site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • 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.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

We continue this forums streak of awful takes on AI. Your bait sucks but I took it anyway.

claude opus 4.8, which is only 10% better than 4.5

We're already on Opus 4.7, which according to Artificial Analysis scores 15% higher than 4.5. Yes, yes, there are many reasons benchmarks are stupid and bad and wrong and misleading. But your prediction here betrays your ignorance.

AI solves maybe 10 niche, self-value giving math problems that is considered „impressive” by the kinds of people who put calories into math which never seem to come out of math

I don't know shit about high-tier math or how useful it is to society at large, but again, your ignorance is on full display here. I don't really know who Terence Tao is, but I don't think he's paid money to post on twitter, so the math he does must have some value.

AI is still completely useless at real scientific research and reasoning.

This is already wrong. Can you substantiate this in any way? What do you think of AlphaFold?

General coding ability stalls and Anthropic + OpenAI are looking for spiky improvements to models plus tooling ideas.

Finally! An actual prediction. I could see this happening, we shall see.

They begin to think about targeting non-coding white collar work like finance and spreadsheet work since the models are not getting much better at JavaScript, having used up all of the JavaScript data in the entire world.

You're again over your skis. I work at $LARGE_MULTINATIONAL_FINANCIAL_INSTITUTION and its revolutionizing how I work, despite IT making our roll-out as retarded and slow as possible.

having used up all of the JavaScript data in the entire world.

You clearly do not understand RLVR or post-training. Around half of training compute is used on these now, not just reading "all the javascript". Also your javascript quips are an attempt to downplay AI capability. They can program in every language. You can even invent your own programming language that isn't in the training data, and it can code using that too.

2029: Someone is arrested in the United States for plotting a terror attack with GPT.

Another real prediction, i agree with this but wouldn't be surprised to see it even sooner.

Frontier models begin to entshittify as they are increasingly jailed to make them safer

This has been happening this whole time, and especially since 4o

but they're getting really defensive about the new AI tutors, AI nursing assistants, AI portfolio advisors, AI middle manager helpers, AI emailers and spreadsheet workers, and so on.

This is literally already happening

Basically no improvements of relevance are made but Opus 5.0 drops along with GPT 6.0. The models are really only 10% better than GPT 5.5 at making JavaScript code but are 20% more expensive and slower

You think it will take THREE YEARS to get to GPT6 which is only a 10% lift on GPT5.5? This is a prediction, and a really bad one. I look forward to you being wrong in 6-12 months. Mythos, which already exists, is likely a 10% lift on GPT5.5.

Also GPT5.5 is almost 2x the cost of GPT5.4 so the price increases are already happening.

Some startups focus on making data collection tools that could be deployed in workplaces to monitor activities so than LLMs can be improved at non-software tasks.

This is already happening

Everything you say from 2030 onward is so deeply un-credible I'm stopping here. lol, lmao even.

What do you think of AlphaFold

Is not an LLM, its a Diffusion model. If you are going to call someone out bad AI takes then I'd recommend you wrap your head around the AI vs LLM distinction.

AI is still completely useless at real scientific research and reasoning.

It's not doing reasoning via any sort scientific deduction. There is a whole subfield of AI called causal discovery around trying to get models to learn via a causal learner. If you want substance I can fetch you some papers, there are plenty. None of them are LLM papers.

Everything you say from 2030 onward is so deeply un-credible I'm stopping here. lol, lmao even.

Whatever. So what's your prediction? I think Mythos is inferior to 5.5 pro. You think it's 10% better. We'll see.

We're already on Opus 4.7, which according to Artificial Analysis scores 15% higher than 4.5. Yes, yes, there are many reasons benchmarks are stupid and bad and wrong and misleading. But your prediction here betrays your ignorance.

I use GPT, Claude, and DeepSeek daily for software development. I'm not impressed with Opus 4.7. I am with 5.5. v4-pro is way worse than China shills claim. They claim parity with Sonnet 4.6 and I know that's not true because I have specifically jumped ship for various tasks from it to Sonnet 4.6 and have seen massive improvements in outputs.

This is already happening

Great so we'll see if they wrap up early or if they enter the public conscious closer to my timeline.

You're again over your skis. I work at $LARGE_MULTINATIONAL_FINANCIAL_INSTITUTION and its revolutionizing how I work, despite IT making our roll-out as retarded and slow as possible.

You missed that my writing is partially tongue in cheek. Of course these things are happening. Everyone is using AI for everything. It's about public emphasis. So far the emphasis has been exclusively on denigrating software developers. I have finance friends I talk to who still say their jobs can't be automated at all with AI but that mine with be dead in 2 years. An underlying aspect of what I wrote is that that is just mindless anti-software engineer bias and they will get the same or more exposure from AI in due time as the public gets bored with the day of the complete layoffs for the tech workers they despise that will never come. You missed the subtext in my writing and so your reaction is quite biased and relies on incorrect interpretation. The others who reacted like you in this thread made the same mistake. We will see. I'm noticing no one else is giving predictions, they're just sneering, so whatever. I will admit it if the timeline is faster than I described here, come 2 or 3 years.

In what ways though are these truly augmenting and improving the development process on your end apart from simply being a more advanced way of “Googling the answer;” and one you don’t have to stop to verify and audit at each stage of its code generation?

They claim parity with Sonnet 4.6

It's not remotely the best Chinese model for software development, although it's all around smarter than Sonnet. This is just not a very hard capability to have, it's a matter of pedestrian post-training focus. By 2028, Mistral will be better than Sonnet or GPT 5.3. I think this is roughly fair to how it feels in agentic coding.

Your subtext mostly seemed like sneering at these people "I have finance friends I talk to who still say their jobs can't be automated at all with AI" and AI at large, so yes it did cause everyone to respond poorly, because you came across poorly.

Some predictions:

  1. Your finance friends are idiots

  2. white collar work is going to get a huge step change in productivity, and many paradigms will shift across e-commerce and information work as a result. It's hard to fathom how, but agent-to-agent interactions will be levered in many ways. Aside from just making email jobs faster.

  3. What happens to white collar work as a result of this step change is anyone's guess. It depends on Jevons' Paradox, the elasticity of demand for white collar services, and the latent demand for white collar work in our society. Also somewhat rate limited by all our social systems, for example, if lawyers get 10x as productive and demand for legal services simply rises by 10x to meet it, our legal system implodes, so we have big changes ahead! Accounting is a good example. Excel made accountants more productive, but then as a society we chose to consume accounting that is WAY more complicated instead of having less accountants do the same amount of accounting.

  4. I was initially expecting the white collar labour market/productivity situation to start getting weird this year, but its almost 50% of the way through the year and $LARGE_MULTINATIONAL_FINANCIAL_INSTITUTION still hasn't given me Codex or Claude Cowork (genuinely embarrassing...) but my hodge-podge of skills and "open 30 chatGPT tabs to ghetto parallelize" is already changing my output materially.

  5. Once white collar workers have ample access to a Codex or Claude Cowork tier harness with ~Mythos tier base models, shit is going to get freaky for white collar workers unless there is a HUGE increase in the demand for information work.

  6. There is an absurd amount of productivity untapped in simply using the tools we have better, let alone the fact they are getting measurably better month over month. ChatGPT was noticeably shittier at using excel in early march 2026 than it is today (pre 5.4).

  7. The roll-out of 5 and 6 will take way longer than I think, because institutions are SO slow. And all the idiots like your friends (and you?) who refuse to embrace these tools cause diffusion to slow. But once the snowball starts, it'll be sink or swim for those not adopting quickly, and that will speed up roll-out, one way or another.

I have no predictions on robots/autonomous cars, but podcasters I trust keep saying robots are quite far away still, which is super lame.

I don’t expect demand for human work to expand indefinitely as there are often no benefits to expanding them. If everyone starts suing for trivial things, eventually there’s no benefits to be had if every I.e paper cut or hurt feeling can be sued over. Add in that the system itself will tamp down just to get stability (how much insurance would a business need if even the slightest problem results in a lawsuit, and how long until laws are tightened to prevent that?). And as for accounting and other forms of analytics, I don’t think you have infinite demand simply because after a certain level of detail, you capture so much noise that it adds no information, or at least no useful information. Walmart might be able to determine exactly how much rain must fall in a given area to depress sales .001%. It’s not very useful, and when coupled with dozens of other potential factors, teasing out that from “car accidents in nearby roads”, “squirrel chews power lines”, “local sports all team on a losing streak”, and on to dozens of other potential factors for depressed sales (few of which can be predicted or acted upon) it’s just not worth gathering or collating that data. Jevon’s law in my view probably has a curve at some point. We just aren’t there yet.

you missed the subtext in my writing and so your reaction is quite biased and relies on incorrect interpretation. The others who reacted like you in this thread made the same mistake.

What on earth is the point of publicly registering predictions when you can claim half of them are a joke? In one year when all the 2030 predictions have come to pass there's nothing stopping you from just saying the whole thing was a joke, what a waste of time.

The predictions are serious, but they're about things hitting a certain level of widespread adoption, not whatever is at .5% adoption right now.