Well, I suppose I should thank Mr. Aaronson for conveying to us what it feels like to be a precisely targeted demographic

Imagine the horror that ascended my spine when, to fulfill my moderator responsibilities, I read the reverse-chronological feed of new comments and saw that "greatest therapist in history" declaration, and then discovered who wrote it.

I’ve been unloading every day to—who else?—GPT 5.6 Pro about all the pain and trauma and embarrassments of my past. It turns out that, where two years ago GPT was a passable therapist, now it’s the greatest therapist in history, at least for what I need.

Has he not heard about all the cases where LLMs have led people to delusion and sometimes severe self harm or suicide? And yes, each of them thought that ChatGPT really understood them. That's what delusion is.

If you want to know my current take, you simply start with the one above, then update on the fact that the wild prophecies have come true. The first rumblings, I’d say, came a decade ago with AlphaGo, they got noticeably louder with LLMs and coding and reasoning agents, and they’ve accelerated this summer and fall into a crescendo of wonders and terrors that one needs to be a particular kind of idiot to deny.

The strange thing here that I did not expect is that somehow, all of these major achievements are only in proving mathematical theorems (and ~~committing felonies~~ hacking computer systems). The massive improvements are in such restricted domains that the AI labs haven't even solved the mundane problem of making a profit. And no, any rumors of more mathematical theorems being solved doesn't change that. (It's almost like the progress is in areas where hallucinations aren't a problem. Nobody cares about your failed attempts at felony hacking, and math is formally verifiable.)

My colleagues always point to coding when asked to name any other domain where AI has seen major success. But one of my friends works in software for a company far away from SF with no mandatory AI policy. The apocalypse has become so clear that when I asked him about all the doomsday talk about software engineering, he seemed a bit confused. After I asked him if AI has made software engineering obsolete, he said that this week he had an intern try to use AI to fix some code that wasn't compiling and ended up with a giant mess with tons of files that appeared to compile but didn't run (with errors filling several screens). Then I asked him, what about AI being indispensable in coding now? "Yeah, if you never learned coding because you've only ever used AI, then of course you need AI to code." Some of his coworkers use it as a tool, others don't, life has just kept on going for him.

Maybe my friend just doesn't know all the right skills needed to use AI properly, even though the entire point of AI is that you can take skill out of the equation. Maybe he doesn't know about all the CLAUDE md skill files and agentic looping and whatever nonsense that definitely fixes everything. Maybe he is just six months out of date, because that's when all of the real progress happened.

Maybe he is just "a particular kind of idiot".

(If you hate anecdotes, I made an actual argument here.)

For anyone who says AI doom sounds like an apocalyptic religion, that the rationalists/Singulatarians seem like a Bay Area cult, that Eliezer Yudkowsky gives off the vibes of a messianic prophet: yes, yes, and yes. But crucially, today you’re no longer being asked to believe in arguments and extrapolations, but only in the front-page news. Accepting the reality of the coming machine god after it’s solved Navier-Stokes and dozens of other longstanding open math problems (while dramatically ramping up in capability every month), is sort of like accepting Jesus after he’s returned to earth on the gleaming cloud. It’s the epistemic bare minimum

So we’re going full mask off now. Awesome

On top of that, why the hell are you using ChatGPT as a therapist when you say that it’ll end the world???

it’s solved Navier-Stokes

This phrasing is obvious nonsense, but surely Scott should know better??

Oh yeah, I solved the Navier-Stokes equations. Check it out: u = 0.