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I don't know if it's because I skip most AI conversations, but I think you guys might have failed to discuss some things that have been happening for the last several weeks.
Reverse engineering with AI has gotten really, really good, somehow. It's so good that you can reverse engineer Microsoft Office and host it online for free. It's so good that you can submit your tokens to the Machine God and get World of Warcraft open source. You can now play the original Xbox Halo, but with 32 player coop (seemingly most of the players being Mexican). On your Nintendo 64. In fact, you can play Halo in your browser now. You can play lots of stuff in your browser now. I looked up an old game called Apeiron for old Macintosh, released in 1990 something, just a Centipede clone developed by Ambrosia Software, long since abandonware. There are two ports of it that I found in comments sections on Macintosh Garden. The classic decompilation site is shutting down due to sheer volume. And yes, there's also mods. Flying my Banshee across the Mojave almost makes me wish for a nuclear winter. My Foundry in Warcraft 3 just told me that my AWP research has completed, so I went on a tear across Lordaeron.
On the other side of this, AI can now shut down 70% of the Internet. This bug was in PHP for a long time, and only now discovered, because someone pointed a technological superweapon at it.
What the hell even happens from all this? Can Apple really continue to have a closed ecosystem? Are we going to wake up with no money in our bank accounts? Does proprietary code even exist anymore? How is Steam going to cope with having tens of thousands more games submitted to it? And why now? AI was good for several months up to now. Was it the release of tools that work with agents effectively? This seems a bit more significant than hundreds of mathematical proofs being published at once to me, especially because you can verify it works yourself, on your machine, and see the effects on the world right in front of you.
The economy and way-of-life of the first world as we know it might be ending. But at least we can play Bloodborne natively on PC.
I'm reminded of a prediction we had just 4 months ago: https://www.themotte.org/post/3758/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/446278?context=8#context
The TLDR of that post was of AI being mostly fake tricks and hype, costs rising faster than intelligence (Opus 5 drops in 2029)... Remember the discourse we had about the AI plateau? Don't hear so much about that anymore.
Kind of? It gets better over time though, whips out new tricks easier and cheaper than before.
We had AI images that were kind of good since the end of 2022, if you did a lot of tricks with them and good prompting. Back in 2023 you could say images were good, albeit text was impossible and certain detailed direction impossible. Then there was that Ghibli phase when GPT image rolled out. And then everyone learned to accept what images could be made and everyone understood that AI could make cartoons with text and images in them, learned to recognize and resent that specific artstyle of GPT-image and nano-banana.
And so AI images are still 'kind of good' in 2026 even though they're much better than 2023.
It's the same with coding I think, except replace 2023 with 2024. Trying to code by copy pasting snippets back and forth was possible. I did it. It was a huge pain though and stuff would just not work. Then we had coding agents. Then the agents get better and better. They start being able to review and check if what they've done works. They get better and better at that. They can see, they can operate all kinds of other software for sound and images.
Progress is constant I think but we suck at gauging steady progress as humans.
given how the navier stokes took $25 million , 10k agents, and a private model to prove the easier version of the problem (which some argue is not the true problem) , for an individual to prove the Riemann hypothesis for only $30k is an optimistic forecast, if anything
The models really hit prime time in mid 2026. The disproof of the Jacobian Conjecture really is what set things in motion, in July 2026. Before then it was assumed mathematicians would always have an edge.
AI images and writing are still kinda bad, but the attention has moved to coding and math, where it really shines. It took 4 years for AI to find its true purpose as a computational tool rather than a creative one.
Spending $30K tokens over 2 years (2029-2030) is the Terence Tao-approved 'mathematician with AI grad student who does the work' kind of thing. He means some mathematician does the principal work, works at human speeds and the AI largely executes directions. It's the status quo but with slightly less tedium for the mathematician.
It's not '2026 agent swarm starts and finishes in a few days.' That's a different kind of scenario, where the AI agents can do all the work and it's principally a matter of the AI's speed, the AI's price, the AI's intelligence. There was some discourse about whether the agent swarm used someone's approach, then some counter-discourse saying that was unlikely, the approach was materially different... Anyway it's not taking years and Terence Tao is upset.
Even in creative works, AI gets better and better. With Opus 5.5 release we had those music videos pop up across AI twitter, they weren't bad. Some human curation of course, some human direction. But a clear capabilities improvement.
I think its writing is fine, with good prompting. I can easily spend a couple of hours building out a story and a setting with it. I have to come up with the premise and that's a bit creatively taxing. But I'm confident that its creative abilities will keep improving every three months like it has been doing. Humans are not going to outwrite entities trained on the whole corpus of writing forever.
Nah it's still terrible at writing essays, imho. It inserts too much hedging language and it often comes off as oddly formal. People complain about AI writing because it has these tells, unless your audience are youtube, Instagram, or tiktok, I suppose . But where it can be useful is if you're trying to write a sentence, but you cannot get the turn of phrase quite right, so you can feed it to Ai and it generates many suggestions and you pick the best sounding one.
Yeah, there is an issue with information density and it not getting right to the heart of the matter.
But also - people don't notice. Not the majority of people: https://x.com/SamaHoole/status/2113126506457186451/photo/1
I see it all the time online:
yeah most people may not notice AI, but all it takes are a few people to make a stink about it and it costs you invaluable credibility, then others see it , too "cannot be unseen effect". Someone taking a screenshot of a pangram score overshadows any good will the author had.
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