The AI Conversation Is Moving Too Fast to Be Comprehensible - The Atlantic

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You hear wild stuff all the time now. Like this story that Nat Friedman, a former CEO of GitHub, told recently at a conference. Friedman uses OpenClaw, an autonomous AI agent that runs on his computer, acting like a personal assistant. One day, his OpenClaw decided that he wasn’t drinking enough water, so Friedman instructed the agent to “do whatever it takes” to make sure he stays hydrated. According to Friedman, eventually the bot directed him to go to the kitchen and drink a bottle of water. It informed him that it was monitoring him via a connected camera in his home. “I’m going to watch to make sure you do it,” the bot supposedly said. Friedman did as he was told, and, moments later, the bot sent him a frame of him drinking the bottle of water and said good job. “I felt like I did do a good job,” Friedman said.<br>The world is only a few years into the AI boom, and this strange brew of hype, utility, and creepiness is commonplace. On X—arguably the beating heart of AI insider discourse—investors, influencers, programmers, researchers, podcasters, and countless hangers-on reach out across the algorithm to shake you by the shoulders. Claude “broke down my entire life with eerie accuracy. No horoscopes. No tarot. Just pure AI,” one post reads. Another crows: “Our team is stunned. We gave Claude Opus 4.6 by @AnthropicAI $10k to trade on @Polymarket. It’s now has an account value of $70,614.59.” The post includes a graph with a small asterisk that notes that this trading was part of a trading simulation and not done with real money.<br>A defining feature of all this evangelizing is its frenetic pace. If you are not paying close attention to the daily AI discourse, a lot of the conversations are almost unintelligible. From week to week, narratives whipsaw. A new prompt seminar “WILL CHANGE HOW YOU BUILD WITH AI FOREVER”; no, wait, prompting is dead. Claude “CHANGES EVERYTHING”; actually, it’s all about OpenAI’s Codex now. Get in, loser, we’re vibe-coding websites. Scratch that: We’re vibe-trading now—earning money while we sleep.<br>It all moves so fast that veterans of the AI discourse jokingly yearn for the good old days … of 2022.<br>I’ve written previously that one of AI’s enduring cultural impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing their mind. Some of that is attributable to the aggressive fanfare or the way that the technology has been explicitly positioned to displace labor. But lately, I believe, it’s the accelerated nature of the AI boom that’s driving people everywhere mad. Both the conversation around the technology and its implementation are governed by an exponential logic. Intelligence, revenues, capabilities—all of it is supposed to hockey stick, say the boosters. New, supposed breakthroughs are touted but then immediately couched with the reminder that this is the worst the technology will ever be. Because AI systems have bled into every domain of our culture and economy, it's exceedingly difficult to evaluate the effect of the technology outside of a case by case basis. That you can’t begin to wrap your mind around the AI boom or orient yourself in it is a feature, not a bug, for those building the technology. But for anyone just trying to adapt, it’s difficult not to feel resentful or alienated. Silicon Valley is trying to speedrun the singularity, and it’s polarizing the rest of us in the process.<br>The whipsaw itself has existed for several years. Since the arrival of ChatGPT, the AI boom has toggled around an “It’s so over”–“We’re so back” axis, with the industry seeming to fall short of its own mythology, then announcing yet another paradigm shift. But the latest shift from chatbots to coding agents—self-directed tools like the one that apparently minded Friedman’s hydration habits—has turbocharged this churn. Boosters see the agents, unlike chatbots, as a convincing step toward the predictions of AI executives that the technology could eliminate untold white-collar jobs and rewire the very nature of work. Adoption and usage of models such as Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex have skyrocketed, alongside revenues. Bubble talk (for now) has chilled out, and CEOs are saying things like “Think of this as the dawn of a new Atomic Age.” We’re so back.<br>In AI research, a popular sentiment is that a “jagged frontier” exists in AI utility and adoption: AI tools can be extremely, unexpectedly good at some human tasks and extremely, unexpectedly bad at others. As this frontier becomes even more jagged, it appears to be pressing people deeper into their previously held opinions of AI, such that AI evangelists and skeptics are living in different worlds. On Reddit and LinkedIn, workers are lamenting managers who have cute names for their bots and who mandate that every marketing summary be run through Microsoft Copilot. Some of those workers say they are writing their memos, pretending to be chatbots, just...