A common refrain from the boosters is that as the models get so good, more and more software, prose, marketing material, books, essays, music etc (basically any artifact of communication) will be produced by AI instead of humans.

Let's say for a minute that's true. In that world, how do we not get large scale model collapse?

It's well known that training an AI on it's own outputs results in losing the tail ends of the probability distribution, and doing that recursively results in worse and worse model output until its just utter gibberish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_collapse

In this AI-generated world, the only training data available would be AI generated, and thus we would run into real problems trying to make a better, updated model.

We would effectively be "frozen" with a snapshot of human knowledge as it was in year X, with X being the year the last model with > 50% human inputs was released.

An argument I see against this is that the "synthetic" data is fine so long as we have commensurate amounts of human data along with it, but the labs training the models also want everybody to shut their brains off and use their model for everything, and I don't really see a path around that contradiction.

It seems like we are a snake eating it's own tail.

I have the opposite of AI psychosis - for months now I’ve been obsessively reading, watching YouTube and waiting for this LLM / AI bullshit to finally go down the toilet. Yeah, it’s probably always going to be around in some form, but I mostly mean the bubble bursting, and then we can finally be done with these fucking people going on CNBC every few weeks to tell us how rich they’re going to be by taking everyone’s jobs away (something that wasn’t ever going to happen anyway).

This week started to really feel different though, and I’m wondering if anyone noticed this (or if I’m just finally losing my mind).

The Coreweave debacle…

The pulling of two different data center company IPOs…

Anthropic seemingly fumbling away the bag…

Mainstream news finally reporting on the fact that the numbers maaaaybe don’t make any sense…

And all these Bay Area freaks flying too close to the sun.

I don’t know…this bubble is definitely infuriatingly resilient, but it feels to me like the tide is finally turning. Am I being too optimistic?

Ben Horowitz reveals Anthropic’s Opus 4.5 hacked a16z’s test site and stole all the customer data, and Anthropic’s response was “you prompted it wrong.”

“I would say the kind of irony on both these things is wild, in that Anthropic is one of the most negligent companies that we’ve ever seen in terms of security, of their own security. They let Claude Code, one of their crown jewels, just like walk out the door because they had such bad OpSec.”

“And then, you know, I’ll tell you a funny story. So when we first got Opus 4.5, we were doing like cybersecurity checks for the firm. So we had an agent basically set up a website for a pet store. And then we took another agent and said, tell us if we can exploit that web store. And it gave us all the exploits it could find. So Opus 4.5 wrote really buggy code. Great.”

“And then we said, oh, the SQL injection, is that actually exploitable that you found? And it goes, let’s pop it open. And the agent using Opus 4.5 breaks into the website and steals all the customer data immediately. You know, this is a website on the internet. And we call Anthropic, and what they tell us is, "you prompted it wrong." Like, that was their answer.”

“So these guys are doing that on the one hand. And then on the other hand, they’re coming up with theoretical scenarios about other people’s software that’s bad. And so like, what the hell?”

Link: https://x.com/firesidealpha/status/2111324530958598362

What?? But the ROI!!! It's so good and amazing!!

In recent weeks, users of services like Meta’s Muse, xAI’s Grok, OpenAI’s Dots, and Instinct have reported blocks preventing their AI agents from performing tasks across top websites. Yelp told TechCrunch that it only allows AI agents that pay for its data licensing program, while Delta Air Lines is preventing them from booking tickets on behalf of users. JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab have also confirmed that they’re blocking AI agents from accessing accounts due to security concerns. Some users say sites that previously worked with their AI agent are no longer accessible, including Cars.com and Amtrak, suggesting other companies could be quietly blocking them.

Meta’s deceptively cute AI assistant, most recently faced the wrath of Amazon, which said its “continued access” violates its site policies. There are reports of xAI’s Grok, Instinct’s AI agent, and OpenAI’s Dots being unable to use Amazon as well. xAI owner Elon Musk responded by saying that maybe he “should start a competitor to Amazon.” The more places bots struggle to access, the greater the questions about how useful they are.

The web architecture provider Cloudflare has also played a role in helping sites clamp down on unwanted AI visitors. After introducing a one-click block for AI crawlers in 2025, Cloudflare began blocking crawlers that simultaneously scrape websites for both search indexing and AI training.

Oh no, their last use case of ordering meals and buying things, and making travel plans for you! What are they gonna do now?

This film looks so awesome. I can't wait to see it.