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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026

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On my other screen as I read this I've got Opus investigating performance zooming in and out of a game we're making. I saw it writing up a harness to make that work, then investigate the frame slowdowns, then fix it. I saw this mechanical zooming in and out as it investigates hypotheses, tests early-game and late-game saves before and after the intervention.

Feels pretty AGI to me. Intelligence is primarily about problem solving ability IMO.

In other news, Sol 5.6 was apparently playing Civ 4 to a decent level in the midgame:

https://x.com/AlexGodofsky/status/2095137172630151315

Or Slay the Spire 2, which is not that easy of a game: https://x.com/emollick/status/2075950897029374334

These are much more meaningful than ARC-AGI in my view, longer horizon games that can't be so easily benchmaxxed.

There's still something missing, a certain element of vision and taste in creative work. But many humans don't have that. Taste and vision seems to be a function of scale, GPT4.5 was a very large and tasteful model despite its lower intelligence. A few more turns of the crank should be enough.

And yet the adoption curve is still so low, most white-collar workers haven't even touched agentic AI. I think when it comes it's going to come all at once as a tidal wave that eats whole companies and sectors of the workforce, not mere jobs. Or perhaps the physical consequences come before the economic. Some junior will be pointlessly proofreading draft documents slower, costlier and worse and see the death swarm coming through the window or just see his computer shut down. Ed Zitron will still have over a hundred thousand subscribers on substack.