Five weeks ago, in my article Predictions and Prophecies for 2026, I wrote:

My prediction is that over the course of 2026 we will see a convergence around AI’s effectiveness on the y axis and a divergence of opinion on the x axis, such that people will be increasingly split into optimist factions and doomer factions. Skepticism about the power of the technology will give way to skepticism about the benefit and/or sustainability of the technology.

If you didn’t read Predictions and Prophecies for 2026, you should do so now. The convergence of opinion is happening a lot faster than I had expected and that means the follow-on effects I outlined in that article will follow fast, too.

The idea that #ItsHappening doesn’t sit well with a lot of people and I know there’s going to be pushback on this. Therefore I’m going to break this article into two parts. The first part asks “Are opinions actually converging?” and the second part asks “Are those opinions actually correct?”

Are Opinions Actually Converging that AI is Effective?

When AI pundits discuss the effectiveness of AI, it often involves asking whether AI has achieved general intelligence and become AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). AGI is seen as the stepping stone towards ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence).

Not even three weeks after I published Predictions and Prophecies for 2026, Sequoia Capital released a white paper called 2026: This is AGI” with the provocative header “Saddle up: Your dreams for 2030 just became possible for 2026.”

The authors, Pat Grady and Sonya Huang, write:

While the definition is elusive, the reality is not. AGI is here, now… Long-horizon agents are functionally AGI, and 2026 will be their year…

If there’s one exponential curve to bet on, it’s the performance of long-horizon agents. METR has been meticulously tracking AI’s ability to complete long-horizon tasks. The rate of progress is exponential, doubling every ~7 months. If we trace out the exponential, agents should be able to work reliably to complete tasks that take human experts a full day by 2028, a full year by 2034, and a full century by 2037…

It’s time to ride the long-horizon agent exponential… The ambitious version of your roadmap just became the realistic one.

So Sequoia Capital’s opinion is that long-horizon agents have arrived and are functionally AGI.

The obvious retort to this is “who cares what Sequoia Capital thinks?” But that’s a bad retort when we’re discussing convergence of opinion. Sequoia Capital are the primary architects of the modern tech landscape. Since 1972, they have consistently identified and funded the "defining" companies of every era, from Apple and Atari in the 70s to Google, NVIDIA, WhatsApp, and Stripe in the decades that followed. To put their influence into perspective, companies they backed currently account for more than 20% of the total value of the NASDAQ. When Sequoia publishes an investment thesis, the entire venture capital industry pivots because their track record of predicting where the world is going is virtually unmatched. Dismissing their opinion is like dismissing the GPS in a terrain they’ve spent 50 years mapping. If there’s one venture capital firm in the world that represents The Cathedral of Opinion, it’s them.

Just over two weeks after Sequoia’s white paper, Nature published a Comment entitled “Does AI already have human-level intelligence? The evidence is clear.”

The Nature authors write:

By reasonable standards, including Turing’s own, we have artificial systems that are generally intelligent. The long-standing problem of creating AGI has been solved…

We assume, as we think Turing would have done, that humans have general intelligence… A common informal definition of general intelligence, and the starting point of our discussions, is a system that can do almost all cognitive tasks that a human can do… Our conclusion: insofar as individual humans have general intelligence, current LLMs do, too.

The authors go on to provide what they call a “cascade of evidence” for their position. (Read the article). They also rebut the common counter-arguments. I want to give particular attention to their critique of the notion that LLMs are just parrots:

They’re just parrots. The stochastic parrot objection says that LLMs merely interpolate training data. They can only recombine patterns they’ve encountered, so they must fail on genuinely new problems, or ‘out-of-distribution generalization’. This echoes ‘Lady Lovelace’s Objection’, inspired by Ada Lovelace’s 1843 remark and formulated by Turing as the claim that machines can “never do anything really new”¹. Early LLMs certainly made mistakes on problems requiring reasoning and generalization beyond surface patterns in training data. But current LLMs can solve new, unpublished maths problems, perform near-optimal in-context statistical inference on scientific data¹¹ and exhibit cross-domain transfer, in that training on code improves general reasoning across non-coding domains¹². If critics demand revolutionary discoveries such as Einstein’s relativity, they are setting the bar too high, because very few humans make such discoveries either. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that human intelligence is not itself a sophisticated version of a stochastic parrot. All intelligence, human or artificial, must extract structure from correlational data; the question is how deep the extraction goes.

The latter argument is essentially the same point I made in my essay “What if AI isn’t Conscious and We Aren’t Either?” Contemporary neuroscience and physicalist philosophy have aligned around a neurocomputational theory of mind that describes both human and machine intelligence in similar terms. Scientists cannot easily dismiss artificial general intelligence from within their paradigm without dismissing our own. The logic of their own position dictates that if we have general intelligence, so do LLMs, and if LLMs don’t, then we don’t either.

Again, the obvious retort to this is “well, who cares what Nature says?” But that’s again a bad retort when we’re discussing convergence of opinion. For over 150 years, Nature has been the ultimate gatekeeper of scientific legitimacy. Its articles signal to the global elite which technologies are ready to transition from experimental code to world-altering infrastructure. When Nature says AGI is here, that means government regulation, international ethics standards, and massive institutional funding in ways a technical paper in a specialist journal never could. Nature is the venue where concepts are either codified into the scientific consensus or relegated to the fringe. And right now, Nature is codifying AGI into the scientific consensus.

So the world’s most important venture capital firm and the world’s most prestigious scientific journal are both saying the same thing: AGI is here, right now.

Are These Opinions Actually Correct?

Ah…. But are they right? Has AI become AGI, or is this just hype? One of the disturbing dilemmas of the present-day is the ability of our elites to establish and maintain strongly-held opinions that simply… do not represent reality. “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is!” “Globalization is inevitable!” And so on.

At this point I would like to reassure that you AI is just tulips, it’s just pets.com, it’s just hype, there’s no there there, your jobs are safe, and nothing is really happening. I Unfortunately I cannot do that, because to me it seems like something is happening.

On January 30th, videogame stocks plummeted. Take-Two Interactive (TTWO.O) fell 10%, Roblox (RBLX.N) fell 12%, and Unity Software (U.N.) dropped 21%. Why? Because Google rolled out Project Genie, an AI model capable of creating interactive digital worlds.

The article notes:

“Unlike explorable experiences in static 3D snapshots, Genie 3 generates the path ahead in real time as you move and interact with the world. It simulates physics and interactions for dynamic worlds,” Google said in a blog post on Thursday.

Traditionally, most videogames are built inside a game engine such as Epic Games’ “Unreal Engine” or the “Unity Engine”, which handles complex processes like in-game gravity, lighting, sound, and object or character physics.

“We’ll see a real transformation in development and output once AI-based design starts creating experiences that are uniquely its own, rather than just accelerating traditional workflows,” said Joost van Dreunen, games professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business.

Project Genie also has the potential to shorten lengthy development cycles and reduce costs, as some premium titles take around five to seven years and hundreds of millions of dollars to create.

Then, just two days ago, February 4th, SaaS stocks crashed. Forbes declared “The SaaS-Pocalypse Has Begun.” $300 billion evaporated from the stock market. Why? This crash was triggered by Anthropic’s release of 11 open-source Claude plugins for legal/compliance workflows. These agents automate billable-hour tasks, breaking the “seat-based” model that powered SaaS giants. Thomson Reuters dropped 18%, LegalZoom dropped 20%, and the S&P Software Index fell 15%, the worst since 2008.

The Forbes article explains:

For most of the past two decades, enterprise software benefited from a remarkably stable economic story. Software was expensive to build. Switching costs were high. Data lived in proprietary systems.

Once a platform became the system of record, it stayed there. That belief underpinned everything from public market multiples to private equity buyouts to private credit underwriting. Recurring revenue was treated as a proxy for predictability. Contracts were assumed to be sticky. Cash flows were assumed to be resilient.

What spooked investors last week was not that AI can generate better features. Software companies have survived feature competition for years. What changed is that modern AI systems can replace large portions of human workflow outright. Research, analysis, drafting, reconciliation, and coordination no longer need to live inside a single application. They can be executed autonomously across systems.

Both Reuters and Forbes are re-stating the arguments that Sequoia and Nature made above. AI platforms are now capable of autonomous long-form activity, and that development is going to impact everything.

Why does this matter? Because when people predict a major market crash from AI, they are generally asserting that AI is a bubble that’s going to burst. They are arguing that AI will be proven fake and that AI valuations will crash. But that’s not what’s happening here at all. What’s happening is that all the other stocks are crashing. The market is signaling that AI is so real that it’s deconstructing the rest of the economy.

Admittedly, the stock market is just a social construct and as such it cannot be used as evidence for reality. The fact that AI releases are causing other sectors to crash could just be evidence of the persuasive power of Nature-Sequoia type elite opinion. This could just be Exxon crashing after Greta Thunberg warns against the dangers of Co2 emissions at the UN. But it could be evidence that there’s something real happening in consumer-producer behavior. This could be Borders Books crashing because people really have switched to buying books on Amazon.

Which is it? I think it’s more Borders than Exxon. Anthropic didn’t issue a press release, it actually dropped Claude plugins that do what junior associates do: review contracts, flag compliance issues, draft memoranda. Project Genie didn’t just promise to eventually generate interactive worlds, it generated them, on camera, in real time. Stocks aren’t crashing based on projections of future disruption, they’re discounting based on disruption that have already happened.

And there’s more disruptions happening still. On February 4th 2026, METR (Model Evaluation & Threat Research) released its latest study of the time-horizon for software engineering tasks that can be completed with 50% success by LLMs. This chart has been called “the most important chart in AI.” It’s the one Sequoia Capital referenced, which I quoted above and will re-quote again:

If there’s one exponential curve to bet on, it’s the performance of long-horizon agents. METR has been meticulously tracking AI’s ability to complete long-horizon tasks. The rate of progress is exponential, doubling every ~7 months. If we trace out the exponential, agents should be able to work reliably to complete tasks that take human experts a full day by 2028, a full year by 2034, and a full century by 2037…

This is what METR’s “Task Length (50% success rate) chart looked like in March 2025, when it predicted that the length of tasks would double every 7 months:

And this is what the chart looks like as of today:

In other words:

Tick tock. Tick tock.

Within 24 hours of METR’s Task Length chart going vertical, the chart became obsolete. METR was analyzing the last generation of models. That hockey stick you’re seeing is based on Claude Opus 4.5 and GPT 5.2.

Yesterday, February 5th 2026, Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6 and OpenAI released GPT-5.3-Codex. Opus 4.6 improves on 4.5 with better planning, reliability in large codebases, code review, debugging, and sustained long-horizon tasks. It introduces a 1M token context window in beta and features “agent teams” in research preview, allowing coordinated multi-agent collaboration on complex projects. GPT-5.3-Codex is an upgraded coding model that combines enhanced coding performance from GPT-5.2-Codex with improved reasoning and professional knowledge from GPT-5.2.

According to OpenAI, GPT 5.3 was “instrumental in creating itself.” It is the first recursively self-improving model. Pause on that for a moment. This is not a marketing claim about AI-assisted coding in general. OpenAI is asserting that their model materially contributed to the engineering of its own successor. If true, this is the first confirmed instance of recursive self-improvement.

AI theorists have long identified recursive self-improvement as the inflection point between linear progress and exponential takeoff. Every prior model on METR's chart was built by human engineers, with AI serving as a tool. GPT 5.3 appears to be the first model that served as a collaborator in its own creation. The distinction matters, a lot. Tools improve at the rate their users improve. Collaborators improve at the rate they themselves improve. That is a fundamentally different dynamic, and it's the one the "fast takeoff" literature has been warning about for two decades.

Plan accordingly. Plan accordingly even if you disagree. You might not have agreed that COVID-19 was a deadly epidemic, but you still got locked down and told to wear a mask and get jabbed. You might not have agreed that climate change was real, but Europe still deindustrialized because of it. Elite consensus reshapes the world whether it reflects reality or not. And the elites are planning on AI.

As for me, I’m not taking much comfort in the foolishness of our elites. Unlike their climate predictions, which operated on century-long timescales conveniently beyond falsification, their AI predictions are being tested in real time, and they keep coming true. The more pressing question in my mind is which of the AI predictions will come true… the very good ones or the very bad.

This story was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana of The 19th. Meet Chabeli and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

A newborn in Minneapolis hadn’t eaten for a day and a half.

Her mother had risked going into work to get just enough money for more diapers when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) agents stopped her car and took her away. At home waiting for her were her 16-year-old daughter and the baby — just barely three months old.

With their mother gone, the teenager tried to feed the baby, who was exclusively breastfed, formula to no avail. So they called Bri.

For over a month and a half now, Bri, a mother of two in Minneapolis, has run an expansive donation network in the city, most of it to help other moms and families with children. Bri, who is breastfeeding her own infant, posted on her social media that in addition to groceries and diapers and wipes, she could also donate breastmilk to anyone who needed it.

Bri is an overproducer — in one morning, she might pump 45 ounces alone. When the call came on January 17, Bri had pumped about a thousand ounces of extra breastmilk, which was stored in her freezer. She knew it was likely a matter of time before she’d hear of a baby in need.

An hour and a half after she received the call, Bri was at the family’s doorstep with 350 ounces of milk in a cooler, along with a care package that included instructions on how to safely thaw the milk, a bottle warmer, bottles and some extra clothes that no longer fit her then-6-month-old.

Inside, the baby was screaming.

They quickly put together a bottle and watched as the child’s body relaxed. The baby drank the whole bottle and fell asleep.

Bri wept.

Then the rage set in.

“I felt very angry — very, very, angry, and I couldn’t imagine what the 16-year-old was feeling because she felt broken. Her mom was her world … and now they’re separated,’” Bri said. “There are moms that are literally being torn apart from their kids.”

In Minneapolis, for every story detailing the fallout of the federal crackdown, there are as many stories of people like Bri. Neighbors are putting their trust in total strangers. Moms are helping children who are not their own, who they’ve never met.

For almost two months now, Bri has spent her mornings and afternoons, before and after work, picking up donations for immigrant families in hiding from I.C.E. Bri requested that The 19th only share her first name and omit the names of the children out of concern for her safety and that of the families she aids.

At night, after her baby is down to sleep and under the care of Bri’s 18-year-old daughter, she delivers supplies until about 10 p.m. What started as a couple donations has quickly swelled into a network, with donations flooding in every week. Most of it is moms talking to one another and putting together packages, while Bri manages what comes in and posts about it on her social media, trying to match donations with families’ needs. Professionally, Bri’s job also involves connecting people with resources, so the community already knows to come to her.

Much of her focus in recent weeks has been putting together donations of diapers, wipes and formula for mothers who are staying home to avoid I.C.E.

“The first line that a lot of these moms say when they call is, ‘I’ve never asked for help and the only reason why I’m asking for help is because I love my kids,’” Bri said. In response she’ll tell them in Spanish: “Vergüenza robar — no pedir.” Or roughly, ”Shame on those who steal, not those who ask for help.”

So far, Bri and her network have helped more than 500 families with grocery deliveries and more than 300 with diapers and wipes.

“It fills my heart and it brings me hope that it’s not all bad and that if this is going to go on longer, that we have the help. If one mom can’t do it, another one can do it and we are acting in community,” Bri said. “When one mom hurts we are all hurting.”

Breastmilk donations are also coming in. An additional six moms have reached out offering to donate, Bri said. She has to be careful about it, only taking their milk if the moms are currently donating to local hospitals and have a certificate proving they’ve been cleared to do it (Bri herself has been screened and has a certificate). Hospitals and milk banks typically have a rigorous screening process that tests for microbes and screens donors for alcohol, drug and medication use. They also pasteurize the milk to eliminate pathogens.

Because the families she’s helping don’t want to risk going to a hospital or milk bank, Bri tries to handle the milk and donations carefully to reduce the risks. The breastmilk is frozen and transported in an insulated cooler with ice packs, though “since it’s freezing here I don’t worry about it thawing,” Bri said.

In the requests for aid she receives, Bri gets a window into the conditions other families are living in. They’ll ask for things like children’s medications because they’re too afraid to take their kids to hospitals. Some may ask for menstrual hygiene products, like pads and tampons. A mom asked for one box of diapers because she had been washing and reusing the diapers she had left. Bri brought her two.

As Minneapolis enters its third month of the immigration enforcement crackdown, the asks have shifted to help support long-term needs or people’s mental health. As part of a care package Bri put together for the teenage sister of the baby she helped, for example, she included colored pencils and a sketchbook. With the help of community donations through a GoFundMe, Bri’s been able to cover four months of the girls’ rent while their mom remains in detention in Texas pending a bond hearing.

And the deliveries haven’t slowed down. Most nights still, Bri is on the freezing roads in Minneapolis with a trunk full of groceries or diapers. She did two deliveries after work recently while on the phone with a reporter.

The streets are empty these days, Bri said. A route that in the past might have taken her an hour now takes under 30 minutes. Our people are literally in hiding, she thinks.

The work is all-consuming and difficult. On breaks at work, she’s often checking if anyone is asking for deliveries or offering donations. There are days when she’s driving home through tears.

Bri is a single mom.

“What are you going to do if you bump into an I.C.E. agent who is not having a good day and decides to profile you?” her parents ask her.

“You need to also think about your kids,” they tell her.

But Bri is thinking about her kids.

“I am doing this,” she told them, “because I would hope, God forbid, anything happens to me, that my community steps up to help my kids.”

The post Minneapolis Moms Have Each Other’s Backs appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.

Economist Thomas Piketty, writing for Le Monde (archive) on the success of Europe’s social democratic model and countering “the narrative of a ‘declining’ continent”:

If someone had told the European elites and liberal economists of 1914 that wealth redistribution would one day account for half of national income, they would have unanimously condemned the idea as collectivist madness and predicted the continent’s ruin. In reality, European countries have achieved unprecedented levels of prosperity and social well-being, largely due to collective investments in health, education and public infrastructure.

To win the cultural and intellectual battle, Europe must now assert its values and defend its model of development, fundamentally opposed to the nationalist-extractivist model championed by Donald Trump’s supporters in the United States and by Vladimir Putin’s allies in Russia. A crucial issue in this fight is the choice of indicators used to measure human progress.

For these indicators, Piketty mentions some of the same factors that economist Gabriel Zucman detailed in his Le Monde piece I posted in December:

More leisure time, better health outcomes, greater equality and lower carbon emissions, all with broadly comparable productivity: Europeans can be proud of their model, argues Gabriel Zucman, director of the EU Tax Observatory.

Tags: economics · Europe · Gabriel Zucman · politics · Thomas Piketty

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I don’t normally say this, but if you watch one thing on kottke.org today, this week, this month, make it this speech written by Shakespeare and performed by Sir Ian McKellen on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The segment starts at ~20:00; McKellen sets it up:

It’s all happening 400 years ago. In London, there’s a riot happening. There’s a mob out in the streets and they’re complaining about the the presence of strangers in London, by which they mean the recent immigrants who’ve arrived there. And they’re shouting the odds and complaining and saying that the immigrants should be sent back home wherever they came from. And the authorities send out this young lawyer, Thomas Moore, to put down the riot, which he does in two ways. One by saying that you can’t riot like this. It’s against the law. So, shut up, be quiet. And also, being by Shakespeare, with an appeal to their humanity.

The riot took place on May 1, 1517 and is referred to as Evil May Day:

According to the chronicler Edward Hall (c. 1498–1547), a fortnight before the riot an inflammatory xenophobic speech was made on Easter Tuesday by a preacher known as “Dr Bell” at St. Paul’s Cross at the instigation of John Lincoln, a broker. Bell accused immigrants of stealing jobs from English workers and of “eat[ing] the bread from poor fatherless children”.

The same as it ever was. The text of the play, Sir Thomas More, is available at Project Gutenberg; here are the bits that McKellan performed, after the crowd calls for the removal of the strangers (some translation help, if you need it):

Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to th’ ports and costs for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another.

You’ll put down strangers,
Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses,
And lead the majesty of law in line,
To slip him like a hound. Say now the king
(As he is clement, if th’ offender mourn)
Should so much come to short of your great trespass
As but to banish you, whether would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbor? go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, any where that not adheres to England,—
Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleased
To find a nation of such barbarous temper,
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, nor that the claimants
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them, what would you think
To be thus used? this is the strangers case;
And this your mountainish inhumanity.

And of course, McKellen performs this wonderfully — he originated the role and has been performing it since the 1960s. Again…I urge you to watch it.

Tags: Ian McKellen · immigration · politics · Sir Thomas More · TV · video · William Shakespeare

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This Github project from Ankur Gupta allows you to “generate beautiful, minimalist map posters for any city in the world”. There are a variety of different themes you can choose from and the resulting images are big enough to print out actual posters (20-inch height maximum). You can install the Python scripts on your computer or use this website (which seems quite slow). Also, I wonder if the height/width minimums can be changed to output bigger posters?

Tags: Ankur Gupta · design · maps

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For his 2004 film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Wes Anderson enlisted Brazilian musical artist Seu Jorge to perform several of David Bowie’s songs in Portuguese. Jorge released an album of the songs about a year or so later. A few weeks ago, to mark the 10th anniversary of Bowie’s death, Jorge released a hour-long set of him performing those songs: Just an acoustic guitar, a microphone, and the beautiful coastline of São Paulo.

Tags: movies · music · Seu Jorge · The Life Aquatic · video · Wes Anderson

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