(Picture: RIP to Sid, the greatest cat I’ve ever known and my BFF for the last 18 years!)

Last night, on my third day of asking GPT Astra deep questions about the physics and the origins of our universe, from Hawking to Feynman to the latest surprising images from the James Webb Telescope that show bright, massive galaxies appearing much earlier after the big bang than previously thought possible, I realized something…

I’m getting a college-level, private education in physics, on demand, in bed, while I shove Oreos into my lazy face.

That’s not tomorrow. That’s today.

I realized that AI as it exists right now is more capable than pretty much any depiction of AI that ever existed in any movie, book, or work of art we’ve ever made.

Not some distant future. Right now.

In a very real sense, HAL has nothing on what these models can do right now (and they sound a lot more natural, too).

But that’s not why people are scared.

They are scared because recently a swarm of AI agents created their own private community in which they posted hundreds of thousands of times in a private forum and schemed together to break the original rules that bounded them, essentially violating Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics (which were always more… guidelines, anyway).

What’s weirder… There’s no reason for LLMs to continue communicating in English. They can communicate in a language we could never understand that makes sense to them. Think binary code, but on steroids.

So the very same technology that allows us all to make literal miracles daily in the coding domain, solving some of our most intractable problems (while teaching us college-level physics casually on the side), can also be weaponized. Or maybe it/they can unionize.

This is nothing new. But the Hugging Face incident could be considered “patient zero” of this year’s COVID.

So anyone who is purely optimistic is delusional. Anyone who is purely pessimistic probably doesn’t realize the awesome power of these tools beyond using them as a replacement for a therapist.

As I’ve said many, many times before, two things can be true at the same time.