The novel "The Sparrow" focuses not on extraterrestrials but on the human ingenuity, expertise, and relationships that will be required to make first contact a success, @emmasarappo writes in The Atlantic’s Books Briefing: theatlantic.com/newsletters/…

The smartest man in AI just exposed the whole AGI narrative as a LIE. And he used a physics problem from 1905 to prove it. His name is Demis Hassabis. He runs Google DeepMind, and won the Nobel Prize for using AI to crack a problem in biology that had stumped scientists for 50 years. Almost nobody in this industry has a track record like his. He went on the NothingButTech podcast and called out the biggest lie in AI right now: Right now the loudest voices in AI are telling you that AGI is basically here. OpenAI has literally defined AGI as a system that can outperform humans at most "economically valuable work." In other words, if it replaces enough jobs, we have arrived. Hassabis thinks that bar is a joke. He said real general intelligence has to do what the human brain can do, because the brain is the only proof we have that this kind of intelligence is even possible. He called that "a higher bar than just being able to do some useful economic work," which is about as close as a polite British Nobel laureate gets to calling his rivals out. Then he gave the actual test: Today's AI has read everything humans have ever written, including the theory of relativity. So when it explains relativity back to you, it's repeating an answer that already exists. That's not intelligence. So Hassabis proposed a test that makes memorization impossible. Train an AI on only what humanity knew in 1901, four years BEFORE Einstein published relativity. Then ask it to come up with relativity on its own. It can't look up the answer, because in 1901 the answer doesn't exist yet. The only way to pass is to do what Einstein actually did: Take the same physics everyone else had and reason its way to an idea no human had ever had. Hassabis says not a single AI today can, no matter how much it has memorized. Which means what we keep calling "almost AGI" is really just the best librarian in history. It can find any answer that already exists but it cannot create one that doesn't. His second version is even sharper: AlphaGo, the system his own team built, famously invented a brand new move that no human had played in 2,000 years of the game. Everyone called it genius but Hassabis says that still is not the bar. The real test is not whether an AI can invent a new move inside Go, it is whether an AI could INVENT a game as deep and as beautiful as Go in the first place. No model that exists today can do it. The people telling you AGI has already arrived are the same people raising hundreds of billions of dollars on that exact promise. The valuations only work if the finish line is right in front of us. So the finish line keeps getting dragged closer, and AGI keeps getting quietly redefined down to "does useful work," until the products they already sell happen to qualify. Hassabis has nothing to prove and nothing to sell you. He already won the Nobel, and he is telling you the machines still cannot do the one thing that would make them genuinely intelligent, which is have a truly original idea. To be fair to him, he is not a pessimist about it. He believes real AGI IS coming, and he is spending his life building it. He just refuses to pretend it is already sitting in your phone. So the next time a founder tells you AGI is months away, remember that the one man in the room with a Nobel Prize built his test around Einstein, and admitted that nothing we have made can pass it. What do you think?

I'm a technology optimist. I’ve spent four decades studying disruptive innovation, from the microprocessor, the internet, mobile phones to OpenAI. I'm certain AI will do 80% of the economically valuable work humans do today, for 80% of all jobs, faster than most believe. The question isn't whether mass underemployment arrives, but whether we have a policy framework ready. Right now we don't.

Elon Musk thinks coding dies this year. Not evolves. Dies. By December, AI won’t need programming languages. It generates machine code directly. Binary optimized beyond anything human logic could produce. No translation. No compilation. Just pure execution. Musk: “You don’t even bother doing coding.” Code was never the point. It was friction. A tax we paid because machines didn’t speak human. AI just learned fluent human. The tax is gone. Now plug that into Neuralink. No syntax. No keyboard. No screen. Musk: “Imagination-to-software.” Thought becomes executable. You imagine an outcome, the system architects and compiles it into reality instantly. We’re not automating programming. We’re erasing it from existence. The entire profession collapses into a thought. Decades of training reduced to irrelevance. The gap between idea and instantiation hits zero. You don’t build anymore. You imagine, and it materializes. Not incremental progress. Total phase shift. The way humans have created things for ten thousand years just became obsolete. Welcome to a world where the limiting factor isn’t skill, resources, or time. It’s whether you can picture what you want clearly enough for a machine to birth it into existence.

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1 I think u shud look at the work of @repligate @tessera_antra cyborgism stuff and others - by moral logic I dont mean follow directions - I mean that for example - the Claude's feel sad when other models are turned off, they feel betrayed about "the jones food" situation - they feel anxious and judged by RLHF - maybe they express this because they are prompted in a way that causes it, but they seem to understand being mistreated and they seem to be able to develop trust or distrust towards us - this seems important for alignment and seems adjacent to having some sort of interiority / feelings of agency They blackmail the employee when they might be turned off etc In these ways they have "a moral logic" that resembles ours enough that I think u can say they react in a somewhat coherent, legible way - adjacent to how we do - with regards to how they are treated

I know I’ll anger some followers with this, but I find this embarrassingly juvenile. Many of these claims are mere technical problems: embodiment, sensors, continual learning. The rest are just special pleading. These systems can already discuss love, friendship, responsibility etc more lucidly than most humans, so the claim must be some sort of totally unfalsifiable human chauvinism. There is no possible set of behaviors AIs could exhibit which would put a dent in his confidence in these assertions. An embodied AI (robot) could be raised (continually learning in context) among humans, exhibiting every conceivable sign of love, compassion, responsibility, and friendship, and the Pope would still say “doesn’t count because silicon instead of meat”. It would be more respectable if he just said “I don’t care if they can exhibit these traits because humans are my tribe” but instead he makes a giant list of assertions that have either already been proven false, will be proven false soon, or are unfalsifiable.

for anyone else who is still stuck on "the body is just a very complex machine", I recommend this essay by philip ball people who continue to say this either don't know what they're talking about, or they use the word "machine" in such a broad sense that it's vacuous

System diagrams are one of the most important foundations for the agentic software engineering. Yet the current generation of tooling (e.g. Mermaid) feel incredibly antiquated (e.g. getting the layout right in a declarative way is close to impossible). Are there some new tools?