The Flat Curve Society. Hi-ho, we’ve reached the moment, in… | by Steve Yegge | Jun, 2026 | MediumSitemapOpen in appSign up<br>Sign in
Medium Logo
Get app<br>Write
Search
Sign up<br>Sign in
The Flat Curve Society
Steve Yegge
18 min read·<br>Just now
Listen
Share
Press enter or click to view image in full size
The Flat Curve SocietyHi-ho, we’ve reached the moment, in this movie we’re all watching together on X, where model intelligence has become dangerous. Dario predicted years ago that it would happen this year. With Fable being (briefly) shut off by the USG, it’s the first highly visible sign that we’ve crossed into treacherous waters.<br>Which is too bad, really. I was hoping that we’d get a couple more generations of model upgrades, powerful enough to convince all remaining skeptics, before we got to one that was a security problem. But the Mythos class (Fable being the sloppily-guardrailed version they released last week) has everyone spooked.<br>Now that we know models are getting dangerous, we can do some extrapolating.<br>The AI race isn’t going to slow down, and AI will continue to grow exponentially in capability. Unfortunately, most of you aren’t going to see it progress anymore.<br>I am now in the camp who believe that we are only at most two or three model generations away from AI finally being controlled like nuclear weapons. Only a few will have access to superintelligence above the classes of models we’re seeing this year. As far as I can tell, most Fortune 500 companies will either not have access at all, or it will be tightly controlled for only a small subset of the company. And it will be supervised.<br>I think those with access to powerful frontier models will sell intelligence like a vending machine: You send them a software spec or a problem to solve, and their models implement it for you, on their servers, with your dollars. And since most companies aren’t going to want to send their code and problems to the model vendors, I think the world will learn to live with the models we do have access to.<br>Press enter or click to view image in full size
Superintelligence Under Lock and KeyEvery government will restrict access, acting on its own. Nuclear weapons are scarce because it’s hard to get enriched uranium. AI is going the same way, with the chokepoint being the supply chain — something governments can actually clamp down on. China will lock superintelligence inside its own borders as hard as the USG will. And if China ends up taking the frontier lead, it just changes where the power is concentrated, but not the overall shape of the world we’re going to be operating in.<br>A World of Mediocre Models<br>Many of us hoped OSS models would keep us on the exponential curve. They trail the frontier by roughly seven months. But they stay on that curve by training on compute which increasingly takes international-relations-level dealmaking to secure. Maybe distillation or some clever peer-to-peer training scheme keeps them in the race. But to push past Fable class they’d have to do it while the whole hardware-and-software supply chain gets locked down the way the nuclear chain was. And the frontier labs themselves are going to decline to help train the next dangerous open model.<br>If OSS hits Fable class next year anyway, that’s great for the world. But open models are not going to blow past Fable class, not with a huge compute wall and government lockdowns looming.<br>So again, today’s models are roughly as good as we’re going to get.<br>As disappointing as I find that in some ways, I find it still has a lot of upside to be happy about. Because today’s models, particularly Fable-class, are plenty good enough. They will still utterly transform coding and knowledge work. It’s just not going to be a walk in the park. It will take a big, multi-year effort to pivot.<br>I’m going to assume for the rest of this post that we will all get Fable back, and that we may even get one higher class of model before further advancements become inaccessible to all but a very few.<br>Many of you have been expecting the hockey-stick AI advancement curve to level out soon, refusing to believe that it’s truly on an exponential curve that could lead to it being so much smarter than humans. You predicted AI would not be able to replace human engineers.<br>In a way, you turned out to be right. A very practical way.<br>In reality, behind the scenes, the curve is NOT flattening at all; the exponential growth will continue, and you will be able to see outwardly observable signs of it, e.g. in data center growth.<br>But the curve will appear to flatten out for you, through two separate phenomena.<br>The first reason is the one we already mentioned: they’re going to keep the smartest (and thus dangerous) models out of our hands. So most of us never get a chance to try them out. And those models certainly won’t be replacing engineers, if we can’t use them.<br>The other reason’s kind of interesting, and it took me a while to see that it’s really the same reason wearing a...