Is this happening?

Where are we and AI going?

Aug 22, 2025

Throughout the week I've just continually gathered more AI links (captured below) and I keep feeling like somewhere at the corner of my brain there's a way of cohering all of them together. I don't actually think I'm going to be able to do it but, fuck it, it's Friday and I literally saved these links so I could close chrome and get my computer memory back.

I find the state of the world impossible to wrap my head around. An LLM is trained by throwing trillions of words at it so that it begins to see patterns and figure out the next word that should come as it talks. Similarly I've been "training" myself in the same way for most of my life. Goodreads tells me I've read 1,127 books. I generally read thousands and thousands of words on a daily basis between books and the "real world" stuff. Chatting with ChatGPT about my reading habits, I think I'm well past a quarter of a BILLION words. For perspective, I would need over 100,000 years to catch-up to the amount of information that ChatGPT has digested if we assume its corpus is 1 trillion words and that’s under sized at this point.

That's a good number. I would need around 100,000 years to read a trillion words. ChatGPT has surpassed me by multiple hundreds of thousands of years. ChatGPT is barely five years old.

And yet, right now, I am far superior to it in many ways. I can change. I can love and hate. I can build mental models. I have far superior sample-efficient learning. I have judgement and insight. I, like every human, have been practicing continuous learning my entire existence.

But I cannot read trillions of words. I cannot learn the patterns inherent in the gestalt of human writing. I cannot use that crushing weight of words to guess what comes next and get it right most of the time.

One of my deepest, darkest fears is that as I get older I'll end up with dementia. Absolutely terrifies me. I feel that the thing that separates me, that separates us, from the rest of biology is our ability to think. The idea of losing that...

I think all of us understand this. To be human is to think yourself superior to all the other life around you. Because we are. We turn the rest of life around us into tools, or food, or decoration, or companions that depend on us to survive. To be us, to have our mind, is to be ascendant and bend reality to our will like nothing else.

Except...maybe not anymore?

Is AI really just another tool? I think the world is grappling with being able to answer this question. And the reactions are as varied as humanity. The richest humans in existence are obsessed with taking it further. Others are terrified of it. Others constantly seek reasons to minimize it. Others want to leverage it and damn the cost to those around them.

AI sprang onto the scene not even three years ago and yet it now occupies an astounding amount of the world's brain cycles, economy, and energy. I couldn't even imagine not using it on a daily basis now. It is my companion sitting next to me that has read trillions of words. It is my agent. My tool. My good right hand.

And someday soon, very possibly before my son even finishes high school, that might change. Someday soon humanity might not be ascendant anymore. In all of human existence the gulf between us and other life was insurmountable. But now we appear on track to create something that will surpass us.

And everyone, including me, is terrified. I'm not sure everyone really realizes it. I'm not sure I really realized it until this last week and while I wrote this. But the more I read the more I'm growing convinced that, whether or not it's even possible, the world is growing to fear that it is happening. That we're losing our place on top. Because, unlike every tool we've created in the past, this one...is fucking eerie. Because it's beyond us in ways that we don't understand. We've made a thing that might topple us from the top of existence and we're looking at each other and asking "is this really happening?"

Anyways, happy Friday!

Squirt Says…

AI may be powerful but it will never surpass its creators. Humanity has hosted many intelligent people, but how many of them used their brilliance for bad? None.

Intelligence leaves no room for stupidity which leaves no room for evil. We could also pull the plug on it at any time. It's not connected to a robot that can move around, well, the smart ones aren't. Also it sums up all the stuff we have put on the internet so it cannot go past humanity.

Dad Says…

We had a discussion about the brilliance of evil people (e.g. Hitler) but he was adamant that bad people were not smart. The definition of “smart” is something we’re still trying to pin down.

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