Take off
A short ride in a fast machine.
What is happening right now? You’d be forgiven for not knowing. Was Claude Code the inflection point for humankind? Is this the singularity? Doomsday? People who sell AI products are telling us that it is; that we’re on the precipice; that it’s February 2020, but the outbreak is bigger, and the disease is terminal. People who sell AI models are telling us they aren’t sure if they’re sentient. The people who were supposed to make those models safe believe that the world is in peril; they are quitting their jobs to pursue degrees in poetry. That big AI company is raising “$30 billion in Series G funding at $380 billion post-money valuation.” Another big AI company is “finalizing first commitments for $100 billion mega round.” They are hiring the guy who made the lobsters; he will be starting a foundation, inside the for-profit business that is owned by a foundation. People are quitting their jobs at that company; they are posting about in the New York Times; they are writing poems about the apocalypse. A rocket ship company bought the third AI company; they say they paid $250 billion for it; nobody knows what they paid for it, because the buyer and the seller were the same person. The people who started the AI company that is now owned by the rocket ship company are quitting too; they have to prepare themselves for what’s next; to “recalibrate their gradient on the big picture;” to get ready for the most consequential year in human history. No, other people say; 2026 won’t be like that; it’ll be normal; I bet you $5,000 it will be normal. The guy who predicted AGI will arrive in 2027 did not take the bet. The stock market is crashing. The stock market will be fine. The stock market is disconnected from reality. The stock market will crash again. Introducing Claude Opus 4.6, out on February 5 at 12:45 pm. GPT-5.3-Codex is now available in Codex, out 27 minutes later. GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark is now in research preview, on February 12. This is Claude Sonnet 4.6, on February 17 at 12:49 pm. Grok 4.2 is now available for use, on February 17 at 1:39 pm. Gemini 3.1 Pro is here, yesterday. Coding is solved. Coding was never the problem. We are cooked. We are overcooked. You are no longer the smartest thing on earth. The AI disruption is here. It’s just getting started. You’re already too late. Gary Marcus is still upset. Every link in this paragraph is from this month. It is all moving so, so fast. Maybe we’ll bomb Iran. Maybe we’ll nuke Russia. Maybe the sentient chatbot will help us do it.
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For a generation, politicians and political scientists have been saying, “it’s the economy, stupid.” But what is the economy? The traditional answer is that it’s the statistics. It’s the official measures of inflation, unemployment, and other various facts and figures. But a newer answer, popularized by Kyla Scanton,1 is that it’s the vibes. If people think the economy is bad—because the news tells them that, or because their Twitter feeds are full of people talking about how bad it is—they will believe it’s bad. A recession is the statistics. A vibecession is how we feel, and how we feel comes from what we read on Twitter, and what we watch on TikTok.
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Just look at us—we can’t stop talking about it. It’s no longer just the grifters, selling us their newsletters and ten hacks for getting the most out of Claude. It’s no longer just the rubes, who’ve seen the Illuminati inside of ChatGPT, or a new physics inside of Grok. It’s all of us, all of the time. We talk about what’s coming next; about how everyone else is wrong about what’s next; about how they aren’t going to make it; about how we might not make it. Overheard, moments ago, from a leader at a non-profit: “I’m convinced that, a year or two from now, most jobs could be managing agents.” And then: “I don’t like it, but, should we give a role to AI?” Or, from earlier this week, at a coffee shop, where I ran into an old coworker: “What do you make of this new agentic analysis tool?,” he asked. Another old coworker walked in. “I think AI has taste,” he said.2 The most upvoted story of all time on Hacker News—Silicon Valley’s voting machine; the barometer of its fixations—is the BBC’s announcement that Stephen Hawking died; people left 450 comments. There are 1,049 comments about Opus 4.6; 1,224 comments about Sonnet 4.6; 623 comments about GPT 5.3 Codex; 864 about Gemini 3.1 Pro. There were 511 comments about Opus 4.5; 796 about Sonnet 4.5; 1,066 about Gemini 3; 583 about Gemini 3 Flash; 1,105 about GPT 5.2; 742 about GPT 5.1; 2,541 about GPT 5. And next month, when a new turn of models obsoletes these, we’ll do it all again.
They say the internet is dead, full of robots talking to one another. On the contrary—it is furiously, psychotically alive. It is a vortex of this new psychosis, tightening around a single axel, spinning faster and faster as it does. Log on, and that is all there is.
People sometimes talk about takeoff: That moment when AI becomes capable enough to improve itself; when the curve becomes exponential; when the computers take control. It’s often a technical term, about code and algorithmic methods of machine learning. But there is also a social takeoff—when the world feels like it’s pinning us against our seats; when the machines conquer our attention; when we begin to believe, rightly or wrongly, in their blistering power; when the rattling starts.
Vertigo is the sensation of spinning. It is feeling dizzy, even when the world is standing still. If every Anthropic press release is all we talk about, have the robots not already taken over? If every company is urgently rearranging itself around a workforce of agents, does it matter how well they score on the tests? Are we learning, by posting to our Substacks and reading the discourse, or are we becoming obsessed? Is this takeoff, or just takes?
Feel the AGI. But is that the AI, or is it us?
And arguably, my brother.
This story sounds fake; for better or for worse, it is not.
The pace and formatting of this piece are just as dizzying as the reality it describes, well done :)
This is a fantastic distillation of how the last couple weeks have felt - the dizziness-inducing blitz.
My engineer friends I respect do feel the tide is beginning to turn in favor of AI, which I find...disquieting.
But on the other hand, other tides I see appear to be turning as well. I think your brother is right about a lot of things, although I have had a minor spat or two with him about the economy once or twice, because I do think the numbers fail to capture a changed reality - the numbers look good because they are no longer tracking lived experience well; things look good because the upper echelons are propping stuff up, and of course, those echelons are the ones who write the articles and the newspapers and make the media.
When I talk to people who live on the proverbial ground? Different story.
We live in interesting times, but of late, I find it hard to say they are good interesting. I wish they were, but 'Shitty Cyberpunk' feels so much more accurate with every passing year.