Bored in the AGI Era
Oct 5, 2026·
·
2 min read
muckrAIkers
New models keep dropping, but do they change anything? Jacob explains why he’s checked out. Igor argues it’s worth tracking where the storyline and the evidence diverge. They cover Astra vs. Fable, the AGI claims, labs moving the benchmarks, cheap models catching up, what inference really costs, disputed math results, and why looped transformers worry people who care about monitorability. They close with IPO rumors, data center backlash, and the politics of the winter ahead.
EPISODE RECORDED 2026.09.08; TRANSCRIPT
Chapters
00:00 ❙ Intro
00:23 ❙ Why We're Bored of Model Drops
08:26 ❙ AGI Claims and Moving Benchmarks
15:56 ❙ Sold vs. Delivered
19:16 ❙ IPOs and the Cost of Inference
25:06 ❙ Astra, Math Claims, and Looped Transformers
31:11 ❙ Winter Predictions
39:44 ❙ Outro
00:23 ❙ Why We're Bored of Model Drops
08:26 ❙ AGI Claims and Moving Benchmarks
15:56 ❙ Sold vs. Delivered
19:16 ❙ IPOs and the Cost of Inference
25:06 ❙ Astra, Math Claims, and Looped Transformers
31:11 ❙ Winter Predictions
39:44 ❙ Outro
Links
Models, Benchmarks & Hype
- Forbes article - Anthropic Disabled Fable 5 And Mythos 5 After A U.S. Export-Control Order. Here’s What Happened
- METR report - Brief independent investigation of agents’ behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident
- Sebastian Raschka blogpost - GPT-6 Astra, looped transformers, and hidden reasoning
- ARC Prize blogpost - OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra on ARC-AGI-3
- Artificial Analysis article - How GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, Luna compare on intelligence vs cost
- One Useful Thing blogpost - Centaurs and Cyborgs on the Jagged Frontier
- Bryan Cantrill blogpost - The revolt of the reader
- Fortune article - OpenAI says it cracked Navier-Stokes, one of math’s grand challenges
Bubble Talk
- CNBC article - OpenAI confidentially files for IPO, prepping Wall Street for mega AI debut
- Fortune article - Moody’s flags $662 billion risk at the heart of the data center build-out by just 5 companies
- Dwarkesh Podcast episode - Dario Amodei — “We are near the end of the exponential”
Datacenters
- Google report - Measuring the environmental impact of delivering AI at Google Scale
- PC Gamer article - ‘They’re just hiding the critical information’: Google says its Gemini AI sips a mere ‘five drops’ of water per text prompt, but experts disagree with its findings
- Axios article - Data center uproar scrambles the midterm election
