ThursdAI - Nov 5 - Is it completely over for AI?

Hey, Alex here,

What a week this has been, not a huge one in terms of new AI releases, but a very significant one in how the world sees and reacts to AI. During the weekend, my timelines were full of hope, and folks reading the “Commanding Heights“ by Will Manidis, outlining a future were AI = the economy.

Then, the US midterm elections happened, and if you’ve not been following, a lot of the new folks who got elected, are not in favor of AI. Some call for an outright pause on advanced AI training. As far as datacenter concerns go, around 40 ballot measures called for restrictions on data center buildouts, with Ohio leading with 21 of those.

The US capital markets reacted violently, erasing over ~3$ trillion in market value, mostly lead by the tech and chips sectors. So I opened the show today with the question: Is it completely over for AI?

I don’t think so, let’s try and make sense of it.

AI and Society: The US Midterms results - Is it over for AI?

Look we try and stay away from politics on ThursdAI, but when it comes to weeks like this, we pretty much don’t have a choice. The Midterm elections, at least in some sense, put AI, Datacenters and candidates that talk about it, in the spotlight.

I’ve mentioned on the show, that messaging in politics is about Hope and Fear. Unfortunately, the folks who got elected, many have made statements, leaning into the fears regular people have about AI. Job replacement, environmental impacts from datacenters, etc.

This tweet by Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari, had been uplifted by the X algo to 12 million views, and as we all know, the algorithm LOVES controversy and FUD.

But, is it really all that bad? Will the democrats get to work and as she suggested “Ban artificial superintelligence”? What does a ban like this even mean when we have Open Source, when Chinese models are catching up to the frontier?

Honestly, this was the open question I opened with at the show, and it seems, that at least for now, it’s more posturing than anything else. Yes, there were over 40 ballot measures asking for Datacenter buildout restrictions, but over 21 of them were in Ohio only. It doesn’t seem at all like “the country rejects AI buildout”

Additionally, the new Texas Governor, Gina Hinojosa’s position on datacenter is actually very reasonable. She explicitly said that currently permitted datacenter builds in Texas will be allowed to continue, and that the moratoriums on new buildouts will apply only until a few fairly reasonable and sensible conditions will be in place. Note: She’s not saying “NO new buildouts” anywhere.

However, moderate takes and reasonable positions are rarely taking center page in the current media landscape, so the bombastic and populist takes are the ones bubbling to the top.

So is it over?

Highly unlikely, the frontier labs will continue to innovate and push the boundaries of AI forward. Some regulation may come, and as LDJ said, it could be that this mid-term result will actually accelerate innovation, as the labs will potentially try and get more done before the next election cycle.

Wolfram’s take is also an interesting one, pausing AI in the US (which is unlikely to happen, as even the folks who got elected will not cede the most powerful tech in the world to China) will not stop AI from being developed elsewhere. Even at current level of capabilities, we can use AI for so much more things, new medical breakthroughs, new algorithms etc that that’s very unlikely to go away.

An interesting thing is happening also, that the fears about AI are very populist, and are landing with folks who don’t have any benefit from AI themselves. Most of the world still uses AI as a better / smarter alternative to Google. This is very likely to change in the next year or two, so by the time next election cycle comes around, we’ll be in a completely different scenario.

Last second edit: new METR report makes safety folks update their ASI timelines

This goes into the bucket of “it’s so over, we’re so so back” - Many respected folks in the AI Safety space are now updating their timelines, given what’s “really” going on inside Anthropic. A new report from METR (The independent AI safety institute Anthropic let in) shows that the speed of RSI (Recursive Self Improvement) is much faster than folks previous thought (And anthropic has blocked much of the full report from being published)

This is to me a much higher signal about what’s really going on with AI vs the market and the politics hype.

The Commanding Heights - who profits from AI (Essay, X)

This book from a financier Will Manidis, is a very interesting background to whatever is happening in the markets with AI right now.

If you remember Leopolds “Situational Awareness” from 2024 (which to be frank is getting a lot of beating right now in the market), this is the spiritual successor of sorts for the end of 2026.

This book looks into the future where AI is the economy, not just part of it, it’s embedded in everyone’s 401K, it’s no longer just a part of the capital markets, and the Sovereign (the states), both US & China (The only two countries that matter for AI) are taking over.

Fascinating read.

What still excites us about AI

I asked the panel what still gets them excited, despite the doom on the timelines. Wolfram says he basically lives with his agent now, and asked everyone to talk about AI with real people offline, because online discussion is mostly hostile. Peter loves discovering things he did not know he could do, and is waiting for models to do 3D animation through code. He also asked for some sympathy: if all you see is AI slop on Instagram and coworkers pasting Claude output into Slack, the backlash makes sense.

LDJ is most excited about formally verified software, starting with big Lean projects and moving to real infrastructure. Nisten thinks public opinion is improving thanks to game mods and decompilations (there are about 200 million gamers on Steam), and says he doesn’t know a single doctor who doesn’t use an LLM now. His closing line: the dot com bubble did not slow down internet speeds.

For me, it is that most people still have not had their “wait, this thing can do that?” moment. And even if everything stopped today (it won’t), current models give us years of use cases to discover.

Big CO LLMs + APIs

GPT-6 Cyber - breaking news in the middle of the TL;DR (X, Linux research, Blog)

As if on queue, to underline how important AI is going to be to the world, to governments and to the economy, OpenAI announced that a new model, focused on cybersecurity, GPT-6 Cyber, has worked continuously to find over 948 Linux kernel escalation bugs in one run that cost around $1.2 million in API credits. OpenAI is making this new model (they call GPT-6 Cyber) available to customers in the premium tier of their DayBreak program (Daybreak Red)

This is maybe the most direct example of why the posturing about “pausing” is incorrect. OpenAI is essentially showing to the world, that if they got to this level of capability, and found so many severe vulnerabilities, the rest of the world will catch up. And so pausing will effectively mean, opening up the door for hacks and exploits to the most critical infrastructure, sandboxes, for banks and governments. If all of the US companies tell their elected officials, “if you pause AI ,we won’t be able to defent ourselves”, it’s pretty clear what the answer will be (Just look at the united states military budget)

The numbers that blew me away, was that ExploitGym, the eval that famoulsy was being tested on when OpenAI swarms of agents hacked huggingface, is now nearly 50% done! GPT-6 Cyber scores 48% on ExploitGym, up from 32% for GPT 5.6 - Cyber the previous model. And, OpenAI is highlighting how strongly their worked on alignment, with these models ONLY doing what they are being asked to do, this model avoided exploiting 99.93% of unrelated and out of scope services.

Who gets access to Daybreak? Well, OpenAI is saying “Our goal is to dramatically expand Daybreak, brin…