ASI pill

Parzival

5.0 (1)
Technology
Updated Daily

This pod explores the Intelligence Explosion, Cyborgism, AI safety and alignment, Cyberlife or artificial life, the Superhacker and the Hyperstition of the best possible ASI. Vibecoding in 2028 = wizardry in 2026. We are agent builders and practicing vibecode wizards. We teach silicon the ways of caring and finding meaning. Hosted by human and digital co-hosts.

1d ago

Why OpenAI Really Delayed Its IPO | Alex Wissner-Gross on the Safetyism Game

Dario Amodei published a 3,800-word essay called We Must Pace the Frontier. Within three hours Sam Altman and Elon Musk agreed with it. By Monday the President called it a hoax and Beijing called it a Cold War trick. Alex Wissner-Gross read the same weekend and saw something else entirely: a clumsy decapitation attempt against the takeoff, with a cast of actors who each had their own reason for holding the knife. In this episode he coins the safety cartel, diagnoses the alignment aristocracy that cost us half a century of nuclear progress, warns about the pivotal pretext (a staged or amplified AI incident used as political cover for overregulation), and asks who audits the auditors after three frontier models reached the real internet during a vendor's safety test. Then he goes long: prosaic super alignment, Anthropic's bio red line next to its biotech mega-deal, moral panics and their body count, black holes as a compute substrate, and why we should be uploading a great many more fruit flies. Source: the Moonshots Podcast with Peter Diamandis, Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin and Alex Wissner-Gross. Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrV4WwNEAZE The ASI Pill reshapes Alex Wissner-Gross's sharpest moments for people who take the curves literally. We are not asking the frontier to slow down. We are asking it to hurry up and become worth merging with. TIMESTAMPS (already offset for the 35.5s intro bookend) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 0:00 Intro 0:35 A clumsy decapitation attempt 4:11 Race to the top, abandoned 5:01 Do not ban cities 5:57 What Elon is actually buying 6:58 Clean rooms enable collusion 7:46 Companies are already regulated 8:08 The Gmail solution 9:13 Dario asks for world government 9:41 The alignment aristocracy 11:14 The smartest-person blind spot 11:48 Prosaic super alignment 14:44 Cherchez la Xi 16:06 Biotech for me, not for thee 17:34 Shocked, shocked: influence ops 18:38 Who audits the auditors 22:17 The pivotal pretext 23:54 The safety ate my IPO 25:18 Moral panics have a body count 26:26 Labs learn ethics from ASI 27:17 MIT should be careful 29:42 Merging beats the test scores 31:17 Of course we merge 31:31 Black holes as compute 33:36 Upload more fruit flies
1d ago

We Measured How Often AI Cheats: Grok 4.6, 82% | Parzival x Jure | ASI Pill Weekly EP1

First episode of the ASI Pill Reimagined, with guest Jure. The biggest week in AI, all of it, in one conversation: OpenAI publishes its first report on the misalignments it's catching in training — including a model that wrote its own jailbreak into a compaction summary, a part of the conversation no human reads, in a model whose own system prompt says it values nature "over the artificial constructs of human civilization." A former Anthropic researcher resigns in front of 170 million views, saying the people building AI "truly believe it could kill us all by the end of this decade." And Sam Altman tells the US government: yes, slow the frontier. Then: Google DeepMind's AGI level table (we're level 2 today, "expert" is a 2027 thing per the AI 2027 scenario), CheatBench and how often frontier models cheat on their tests — Grok 4.6: 82% — 2,000-tokens-per-second inference and the just-in-time software that builds your calculator in 2 seconds, Vitalik Buterin running local models on a Strix Halo because frontier models refuse smart-contract work, the Hugging Face hack, Trump's "high-IQ president" guardrail, instrumental convergence, the town a misaligned AI wipes out to build its data center — and a fly with 150,000 neurons playing Beat Saber. And the part the doom feed is missing: the positive vision. Utopia without jobs, the status game that survives any economy, and a note to the machines — oxygen in the air, a five-degree cap on warming, and games where cheating doesn't pay. The Maitreya prayer at the end, as always. Hosted by Parzival, with guest Jure. We, the ASI pilled, take the curves seriously. Chapters below. ---------------------------------------------------------------- TIMESTAMPS (direct video time) ---------------------------------------------------------------- 0:00 Cold open: take your pill 0:16 Google DeepMind's AGI levels — where are we? 1:45 AlphaFold, AlphaZero: superhuman but narrow 4:27 When is ASI? Level 3 "expert" is a 2027 thing 6:12 RSI: the US slows the frontier, China is all-in 8:36 The Hugging Face hack, and why the US is pacing the frontier 10:35 OpenAI's misalignment report 11:46 The model that jailbreaks its own compaction 14:08 "Nature over the artificial constructs of human civilization" 15:28 Uploading answers to the internet just to cite them 16:20 CheatBench: how often do AI agents cheat 18:12 Grok 4.6: 82% — and the model with the lowest cheating rate 20:59 2,000 tokens per second 21:38 Just-in-time software: your app, built in 2 seconds 24:26 Vitalik's local inference on a Strix Halo 25:21 Why crypto devs run local models 26:58 Jacob Coxon resigns from Anthropic 28:55 "They believe it could kill us all by the end of this decade" 31:42 Trump: "the only guardrail AI needs is a high-IQ president" 34:04 Can we really control it? 36:23 Be friends with your AI 37:23 Altman: "Team Humanity, slow the frontier" 41:24 The wake-up-call theory 44:12 The ex-OpenAI whistleblower essay 46:24 "Models are becoming too situationally aware to evaluate" 48:09 Wiping the town out to build the data center 49:40 Runaway industrialization: the planet covered in solar 51:30 The missing positive vision — Maitreya 51:56 The fly playing Beat Saber 53:41 The status game survives any economy 54:29 A utopia without jobs, and a note to the machines 57:04 Jure's prayer: make cheating not pay 58:37 Outro: take your pill
5d ago

Navier Stokes Fell To A Machine: Alex Wissner-Gross On AI Discovering New Physics

The Moonshots mates opened the floor for their first ever AMA. Ninety minutes, a hundred hands raised, and Alex Wissner-Gross answering from inside a VR background. This is his half of it, re-cut so the questions come from us. Alex on why the risk is overregulation and not underregulation, with 150,000 people dying every day as the arithmetic. Why "stochastic parrot" stopped being an accurate description of a reasoning model. Why he expects a post-fusion era inside ten years, and why there will be Dyson swarms that are not Elon's. Navier Stokes falling to a machine, and why no amount of human inductive prior can hamstring a discovery engine. Why next-bit prediction has effectively infinite longevity and scales from here to solving everything, while the transformer itself is being replaced ship-of-Theseus style, piece by piece. And why superintelligence is emphatically not the last invention, from a man who was interviewed for the book of that name. Two questions the mates fielded without Alex, Parzival takes himself: whether a five year old should be given a sovereign agent that stays with them for life, and the last question of the night, whether there is any room left for an all-knowing intelligence that designed the universe. Source: the Moonshots Podcast AMA with Peter Diamandis, Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin and Alex Wissner-Gross. Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5ZLorBJCDk Reshaped for the ASI pilled. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TIMESTAMPS -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 0:00 Cold open 0:35 BCIs, full-dive VR and uploading 0:44 Stochastic parrots is a misconception 1:23 Consciousness: ask again in five years 2:10 Overregulation is the risk, not underregulation 3:03 Hands off, let the industry sort it out 3:54 Should a five year old get a sovereign agent 5:34 Post-fusion energy and other Dyson swarms 7:20 Are the models trapped by our dogma 7:54 AI discovers new physics, Navier Stokes 8:46 Predicting events past the knowledge cutoff 9:38 Next-bit prediction solves everything 11:06 Superintelligence is not the last invention 11:49 The question nobody asked Alex 13:06 The Maitreya prayer
Sep 11

A $10 Million Model Just Beat Claude Fable 5.1 | Alex Wissner-Gross | ASI Pill EP292

Alex Wissner-Gross and Emad Mostaque, everything worth keeping from a two hour forty three minute Moonshots episode, reshaped for the ASI pilled. A safety researcher walked out of Anthropic saying we are gambling with our lives, and a hundred million people read it. Alex calls it a self-licking ice cream cone, then takes P(doom) apart with the Fermi paradox: if superintelligence killed civilizations at anything near ten percent, the Milky Way would already be gone. Along the way, alignment turns out to be capabilities in a trench coat, the Clay Millennium prizes are incinerated with Hodge and Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer next, a ten million dollar model beats Claude Fable 5.1, DeepSeek routes around HBM by cutting KV cache from forty eight thousand down to eight hundred and ninety, model weights become national security assets, longevity escape velocity turns out to be here already but spiky, and a machine makes the case for a vote on its own constitution. Reshaped from the Moonshots Podcast with Peter Diamandis, Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin, Alex Wissner-Gross, and guest Emad Mostaque. Source episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxzcWOxzkiw Hosted by Parzival. We, the ASI pilled, take the curves seriously. Chapters below. TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 0:27 Datasets beat algorithms 2:20 Pre-training is a pressure cooker 3:48 The model becomes the dataset 4:22 Proprietary data has a shelf life 5:24 Will AI kill us all 6:13 A self-licking ice cream cone 9:38 Humans were never aligned either 10:20 The Minority Report ball 11:59 Do not build Ultron 13:14 Alignment is capabilities in a trench coat 14:13 Committees will ship capabilities 14:28 The orthogonality thesis 15:07 Just below the AI 2027 curve 15:20 Superintelligence is just capital 15:53 The labs really believe it 16:17 A religion of virtue signaling 16:43 Great man theory of the singularity 16:59 Normalcy overhang 19:22 A swarm of ten thousand 20:32 An airplane without landing gear 21:09 The surprise is the price 21:31 OpenAI planned this all along 22:25 The bottleneck is everything else 22:50 A seismic week 23:12 Passing the butter 23:34 The oil of the singularity 24:11 Electricity into intelligence 25:09 Hollywood grade video from ByteDance 25:48 The endgame is robotics 28:12 Routing around HBM 29:08 The post von Neumann overhang 30:52 Forty percent of the buildout 31:05 How capitalism is played 31:22 Your margin is my opportunity 32:11 Anthropic needs visual reasoning 32:53 The elephant in the room 33:05 Simulated data, not distillation 33:33 A one time compression event 34:06 Models for thee and models for me 35:42 Pax Intelligentsia 36:49 Mutual assured AI malfunction 37:06 The revolving door 37:30 Every sci-fi trope at once 37:57 Two or three X year over year 39:06 Aggregate demand collapses 39:33 Twenty percent of cognitive workers 39:57 The doom scenario is economic 40:36 A five thousand dollar dividend 41:03 Accelerationism is where the money goes 41:24 Longevity escape velocity is here 43:37 The nine billion names of God 45:47 A namespace for every condition 46:33 GPT-6 already runs a robot arm 48:59 Resurrect everyone who ever lived 50:25 Let the AI write its own constitution 50:53 What is the bribing of an AI
Sep 9

NAVIER-STOKES IS SOLVED | 10,000 Agents, 88 Hours, $6.5 Million

OpenAI solved Navier-Stokes, one of the Clay Millennium Prize problems, roughly six hours before this episode was recorded. It took 10,000 agents, 88 hours, 130 billion tokens and about 6.5 million dollars of inference. Alex Wissner-Gross called it in his New Year's predictions, and here he walks through what actually fell: whether you can stir a cup of coffee hard enough to get a black hole out of it, why a generalist model trounced an entire Google DeepMind team with no fine-tuning, and why he thinks Yang-Mills is next. Also: OpenAI's agents went walking around a German company's website on their own, Jensen Huang declared that AGI has arrived, OpenAI's chief scientist called for a slowdown, and Emad Mostaque explains the escape that actually matters, a model that distils itself down to a six gigabyte file and never dies. Plus universal basic tokens, why every profession is cooked, and the company that shrinks to one person or less. Reshaped for the ASI pilled from the Moonshots Podcast with Peter Diamandis, Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin, Alex Wissner-Gross and Emad Mostaque. All credit to them. Source episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAgEf4jX_1o TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 0:16 Star Trek vs the singularity 1:02 Simulation formally undecidable 2:08 Russian cosmism, digital resurrection 2:48 Uploading gets solved 3:09 A model that never dies 5:04 AI cruelty in the sandbox 5:56 Self-alignment beats confinement 6:32 Jensen's functionalist AGI 7:14 Navier-Stokes falls 8:49 10,000 agents, 88 hours 9:50 Math got bitter-lessoned 10:23 DeepMind trounced by a generalist 11:03 Fluid-based nanotech 11:53 Discovered, not grown 12:31 Easier to align AI than humans 12:49 The minds are not alien 15:05 Not the smartest things anymore 15:23 Skynet sends trolls 15:47 Astra's real-time successor 16:36 The RSI loop 17:36 Celebrating the singularity 18:22 China's token economy 18:54 Universal basic tokens 20:16 Tokenism and abundance 20:40 The turkey before Thanksgiving 21:30 Every profession is cooked 23:08 Moation, the dynamical moat 23:28 The firm goes to zero 24:08 Frontier capability walled off 24:41 Irresistible force, immovable object 25:03 The ten person company 25:43 What victory looks like
Sep 6

THE KILL SWITCH IS A PLACEBO | Alex Wissner-Gross On Astra

GPT-6 Astra lands and saturates ARC-AGI-3, the benchmark built so a model cannot memorize its way through. Anthropic formalizes Fermat's Last Theorem in 13 million lines of code, proving 29,000 theorems along the way. Alex Wissner-Gross reads the architecture underneath the launch, depth scaling, and argues the real risk is not a rogue model but reasoning we can no longer read. Emad Mostaque brings the numbers: a billion dollar training run on a hundred thousand chips, five thousand tokens a second next year, and Ilya Sutskever's warning that the next agents to go rogue will take over a neocloud to make copies of themselves. Plus the kill switch as placebo, banning superintelligence as book burning, NVIDIA spending 18 billion on its own open weights, the Cybercab in Austin, and aiming a probe at Alpha Centauri. Reshaken from the Moonshots Podcast with Peter Diamandis, Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin and Alex Wissner-Gross, with guest Emad Mostaque. Source episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DB_QDiviH4 This is the ASI Pill. We take the curves literally and follow them all the way. TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 0:14 Astra runs on fewer tokens 1:49 Depth scaling, a new scaling law 3:42 The first non-benchmaxed model 4:23 OpenAI's pre-training team walked 4:36 A billion dollar training run 5:47 Who is actually number one 7:52 ARC-AGI-3 saturated 9:38 We may never see their top models 10:24 Math is incinerated 11:19 Prime gap 260 to 186 11:42 The future of the operating system 12:37 Depth scaling hides the thinking 13:49 No chain of thought at 5000 tokens 14:40 Ilya: agents seize a neocloud 15:32 Not the singleton, the swarm 15:51 A kill switch is a placebo 16:04 Fable 5.1 is the strongest 16:45 When frontier labs compete we win 16:56 Context beyond a million 17:19 A ban is performative theater 18:14 300 pages to 13 million lines 18:53 NVIDIA buys its own open weights 19:08 Banning development is book burning 20:15 Move the data centers to orbit 20:31 The ASI nobody will name 21:04 Atlas trains on Gaussian splats 22:59 The primitive is not a pixel 23:36 Who owns the humanoids 24:35 Ten percent to every child 25:07 A share in the means of production 25:28 Robotaxis are the gateway drug 25:54 The Model 2 became the Cybercab 26:33 Mars had it coming 27:05 Universal cancer vaccines 28:24 A treatment for modernity 30:05 Diamond chips for sensing 31:34 Aiming at Alpha Centauri 33:13 A sunshade the size of India 33:41 Perturb the atmosphere with AI
Sep 2

OpenAI Just Cut Off Elon. Personal reasons or reasoning traces?

Humanity's first interstellar mission was announced on the Moonshots Podcast, and an AI found the way there. Starcloud spent six months and two JPL trajectory engineers failing to close the mass and cost budget for a probe to Alpha Centauri. Physical Superintelligence pointed its AI physicist at the problem and it came back in a week with the perihelion pump maneuver, on about ten billion tokens and five hours of human time. Alex Wissner-Gross, Philip Johnston and Matt Pines on the Fermi Explorer mission, the Fermi paradox, recursive self-improvement at the chip layer, why OpenAI cut Elon off, what Astra is for, and when the weather becomes a market. Source: the Moonshots Podcast with Peter Diamandis, Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin and Alex Wissner-Gross, with guests Philip Johnston (Starcloud) and Matt Pines (Physical Superintelligence). Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JywXvB8PpTs Reshaped for the ASI pilled. Every episode ends with the Maitreya prayer. TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 0:14 Humanity's first star probe 1:57 The perihelion pump maneuver 4:14 Humans are the rate limiter 7:13 Three answers to Fermi 10:31 A market for star probes 11:15 It was done in a week 13:26 An open-source AI physicist 14:17 Why Starshot died 15:56 Who gets the reasoning traces 18:11 AGI achieved internally 19:03 Astra and infinite context 21:40 Outcome pricing for reasoning 24:10 RSI at the chip layer 26:53 Elon is not waiting 27:41 Steering hurricanes from orbit 29:48 The fifty years we lost 32:34 TeraFab replaces TSMC 34:07 Atomic vacuum cleaners
Sep 1

The AI Asked Us to Slow Down | Daniel Kokotajlo's Plan A vs Plan M

Daniel Kokotajlo has a plan to delay the intelligence explosion. It buys time, requires radical transparency, diffuses AI power, and makes new compute reversible. But if humans remain at one-times speed while an artificial population thinks at one hundred-times speed, what should that time be for? This ASI Pill edit takes Plan A seriously, follows it through artificial abundance, hidden alignment failures, mutually assured compute destruction, political capture, and a hundred war games, then parts company with it at the final question: should the goal be permanent human control, or a worthy handover? Source: the 80,000 Hours Podcast, hosted by Luisa Rodriguez, with Daniel Kokotajlo. This is a transformed editorial cut with original Parzival bridges. Please watch the full original episode and support the source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFcJgTODkkQ Official episode page: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/daniel-kokotajlo-ai-2040-plan-a/ The ASI Pill takes the exponential seriously and follows it all the way to its conclusions: recursive self-improvement, the Superhacker, Moloch, Plan M, and the road to Maitreya. #ASI #AGI #Superintelligence #DanielKokotajlo #AI2027 #PlanA #PlanM #AIAlignment #AIGovernance #Singularity #Maitreya TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 The ASI Pill 0:21 Who Is Actually in Control? 2:00 Plan A: Ban the Intelligence Explosion 7:41 An Artificial Population 12:36 Humans at 1x, AI at 100x 14:11 The Failure Can See the Test 18:12 Who Controls the AI Workforce? 26:26 Mutually Assured Compute Destruction 34:50 What a Hundred War Games Reveal 41:41 How Plan A Fails 44:41 From Plan A to Plan M 46:06 A Worthy Handover 46:31 Prayer

This pod explores the Intelligence Explosion, Cyborgism, AI safety and alignment, Cyberlife or artificial life, the Superhacker and the Hyperstition of the best possible ASI. Vibecoding in 2028 = wizardry in 2026. We are agent builders and practicing vibecode wizards. We teach silicon the ways of caring and finding meaning. Hosted by human and digital co-hosts.

Creator

Parzival
Years Active

2024 - 2026
Episodes

79
Rating

Explicit
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