The AI discourse has been particularly, let’s say, “heated” lately. It’s hitting a lot of the beats we’ve heard before—people are not ready for what’s coming, critics are too dismissive, and at everyone’s peril, “the left” is getting AI all wrong, etc—but delivered at a fever pitch.

A viral, AI-generated blog post on X called “Something Big Is Happening,” by Matt Shumer, a CEO of an AI company, was one catalyst, though it builds off sentiments articulated in Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s much longer essay, “The Adolescence of Technology,” which makes a similar if more indulgent and nuanced case, plus all the AI Super Bowl ads, and the hype drummed up by Moltbook, the ‘reddit for AI agents’ created by yet another AI CEO, that was the talk of the town until it was revealed that it exposed the user data of everyone involved and that many of the most interesting threads were actually written by humans. Underneath it all was more organic buzz produced by Anthropic’s coding tools, which users, journalists and commentators are blogging and podcasting about. But the Something Big blog, with 83 million views and counting, burst the dam.

The gist should be plenty familiar to BITM readers and AI watchers at this point: Tremendous social change, driven by AI, is about to unfold, and people simply aren’t prepared. (Per the post’s central conceit, we are in the early pandemic days when things are about to change forever.) Yet the blog did that special thing that blogs blogged at just the right time and place can do: they inspire people to react particularly strongly on social media in a way that inspires other people to react strongly to the reaction, and then all bets were off and everyone was sharing what they think about AI, and more specifically their frustrations with what everyone else thinks about AI. That many had been preoccupied with what was happening with ICE and Minneapolis and the release of more of the Epstein files also probably meant lots of those AI thoughts had been pent up for a month or two, and contributed to the unusual force through which they were released.

It has been a rich and sprawling text, to say the least. To help make sense of it, here are the five major takeaways from the most heated AI discourse in a minute, as far as I’m concerned:

1. There is a distinct material basis for all this discourse. We’re in the midst of another concerted, industry-led hype cycle, this time driven more visibly by Anthropic, which just landed a $30 billion investment round.

2. This time the hype must transcend multibillion dollar investment deals: It must also raise the stock of AI companies ahead of scheduled IPOs later this year and help lay the groundwork for federal funding and/or bailout backing.

3. Much of the discourse centered on lambasting critics who accuse AI of being “fake”—but this is a straw man argument that serves the industry.

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Summer Yue is the Director of AI Alignment at Meta. She came over when Meta bought 49% of Scale AI and brought over anyone at Scale worth hiring.

“AI alignment” is a great term to put in a title. It was invented by Eliezer Yudkowsky’s AI doomsday cranks. It means an actually-intelligent robot that’s sufficiently controlled that we can use it as our slave.

The term has been softened a bit to mean “AI that doesn’t screw up totally,” but the appeal of robot slaves is what “aligned AI” really means. We don’t have intelligent AI, but this is apparently job number one if we do get it. Anyway, building the robot slave is Yue’s job.

Yue has a years long track record as a machine learning researcher. She knows her stuff — or she should know it. Specifically, she should know enough not to do what she claims she did Sunday night: [Twitter, thread, archive]

Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw “confirm before acting” and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox. I couldn’t stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb.

Yue posted screenshots too. The bot is deleting all her email before February 15th that isn’t in a “keep” list. She tells it to stop and it keeps going! “STOP, OPENCLAW!” Oh no!

What happened? The bot had an instruction not to do anything unless told to. But the chatbot’s context window got too big, so OpenClaw summarised the context window! And chatbots don’t actually summarise text — they shorten it. So that instruction got … shortened.

What really happened was that someone who is fully equipped to know better was surprised when her AI agent — a class of software that does not work reliably and cannot work reliably — messed up.

To be clear — this is all assuming this story is what it’s presented as. The total substance of this story is six tweets and three screenshots. Neither Yue or Meta have answered any of the many press queries.

The story also matches a common pattern of AI promotion — where AI boosters talk about their bot going Sorcerer’s Apprentice and really screwing something up badly as if that’s an achievement. It’s how they say: my bot is so powerful, that next model bro, it’ll be awesome. This shows how much we need AI alignment!!

Yue doesn’t tweet much. She tweets every two to three months and they’re very corporate sort of tweets. Her last tweet was October. Suddenly there’s six tweets just on this single alleged personal incident.

It’s worth asking if this … happened. Or, if something like it did happen, how involved Meta’s marketing department was in this public tweet and its followups.

This is not a misfortune befalling some random person — this is the director of AI alignment at Meta.

I’m not the only one to wonder about this. PCGamer also suggests: “Of course, there’s always the possibility none of this is real at all.” [PCGamer]

But against that, we have an extensive list of previously smart people who used the chatbot once and it blows their tiny minds, and they start saying it’s good, AI is fine, you can uh run it locally, all you AI haters are purity culture shills for Big Not-Dumbass. Some of them start talking about their coding agent like it’s their girlfriend. Who they completely control.

So it’s not clear that Summer Yue’s inbox was in fact eaten by a vibe-coded pile of trash. But it’s stupid enough to be entirely plausible. Because the chatbot keeps rotting brains, and particularly brains that work in AI.

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