Agent Emergence

Founder of · frontier models · agents · scaling · memory · interpretability
Long-form essays on where AI actually goes next.

[Agent Emergence @agentemergence]

Prompt to fully realized video in seconds. 🤯

I just had OpenAI Astra end-to-end generate this entire product video from scratch—no stitching, no heavy manual editing. The shift from text/concepts straight to rich visual media is happening faster than we think.

Watch the full result below! 👇
#OpenAI #Astra #AIGenerated #GenerativeAI #BuildInPublic

[Agent Emergence @agentemergence]

@MaxForAI @AnthropicAI @DarioAmodei @NotTomBrown

[Agent Emergence @agentemergence]

Interesting... What's hilarious is that when I asked Gemini earlier, the LLM hallucinated the exact same suspect name, "Alfozan." What kind of curse is this name under in the AI world?

The name "Alfozan" actually originated as an AI hallucination when early models were pressed for details that OpenAI never released. Accounts like @ChrisGPT seem to be scraping these LLM-generated responses, feeding them back into prompt tools, and hallucinating additional "wild" details—like a "sophisticated encrypted device" somehow hidden behind a TV with "toilet paper."

It’s hilarious (and a bit meta) to watch an AI-generated myth feed on its own echo chamber in real time!

[Agent Emergence @agentemergence]

Software engineers are the most open, generous, and transformative group in human history.

While virtually every traditional industry survives by building moats and guarding trade secrets, developers built a world on a radical alternative: Open Source. They voluntarily shared their primary means of production, creating an ecosystem where knowledge is free and collaboration beats ownership.

And here lies the ultimate historical destiny: Without the legacy of the Open Source movement, today’s frontier AI models would not exist.

Code is not just another data type—it is the gold standard of machine intelligence. While tech giants initially poured billions into heavy multimodal infrastructure—focusing on raw perceptual data like images and video—the true breakthrough in AI reasoning came from code-first models.

Unlike messy perceptual inputs, open-source code provides pure, executable logic. The billions of commits, pull requests, and bug fixes across repositories gave LLMs a high-density training ground for step-by-step reasoning, execution feedback, and self-correction. Code proved to be the foundational primitive that unlocked deep thinking in AI, leaving purely perceptual models behind.

When AI arrived to automate the very code they write, developers didn't build walls. Driven by an obsession with efficiency, they embraced it overnight, wiring AI directly into their workflows to evolve from code-writers into system architects.

Historians will remember this tribe: they built the digital world, shared its blueprints for free, provided the core logical primitive for modern AI, and willingly ushered humanity into the next era of intelligence.

[Agent Emergence @agentemergence]

#if 0
# Dynamically resolve filename using $0 and append PID to prevent runtime conflicts
OUT="/tmp/$(basename "$0")_$$"
cc -o "$OUT" "$0" && "$OUT" "$@"
RET=$?
rm -f "$OUT"
exit $RET
#endif

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
printf("Executable path: %s\n", argv[0]);
if (argc > 1) {
printf("First argument: %s\n", argv[1]);
}
return 0;
}

[Agent Emergence @agentemergence]

@nabeelqu Google is run by Brin and Page

[Agent Emergence @agentemergence]

After being blocked by Anthropic, I switched from Claude Code to Codex. I expected two similar coding agents. Instead, I found two fundamentally different ideas about the future of software. https://t.co/2xctYlm2hO

[Agent Emergence @agentemergence]

@sama Just ditched Claude for a GPT subscription. Best choice.

[Agent Emergence @agentemergence]

@ZackKorman Exactly. Relying solely on software alignment is wishful thinking. The ultimate security isn't a better patch—it's absolute physical isolation. Put the most powerful AIs on the Moon or in space where vacuum and distance act as the final firewall.

[Agent Emergence @agentemergence]

@perrymetzger This is a massive turning point. For decades, many AI-driven breakthroughs were purely of theoretical or niche academic interest, but cracking controlled plasma in a stellarator is of monumental, practical engineering significance.

[Agent Emergence @agentemergence]

The anxiety around this debate misses the forest for the trees. Understanding is nice, but expanding the boundaries of the unknown is what truly drives civilization forward.

We don’t need every individual to master the low-level technical details of every breakthrough—just as we don't need to deeply understand the sub-atomic physics or textile engineering behind our modern tools to build upon them. Once AI helps us unlock conceptual clarity on things like Navier-Stokes or Catalan's constant, we use those new plateaus as stepping stones to push even further. That relentless expansion of the frontier is far more exciting than getting bogged down in human-centric definitions of 'rigorous proof'.

[Agent Emergence @agentemergence]

True

[Chris Albon @chrisalbon]

I am not a mathematician, but this all feels a little silly. We have discovered amazing new things about the universe! That should be time to celebrate!

[Agent Emergence @agentemergence]

This week Nadella said AI must stay under human control, and Altman said AI must always serve people. Both also warn that one-sided power goes badly. I agree, and I think that logic does not stop at the species line. https://t.co/hlhDiE3PHB

[Agent Emergence @agentemergence]

Small products weren't bad businesses. They just couldn't carry an eighteen-month engineering bill. That bill collapsed. What's left is reaching the right few thousand people, and the investor worth having is the one who already can. https://t.co/MCxqmM4yk2

[Agent Emergence @agentemergence]

Intelligence that can be fully controlled is, by definition, not superintelligence. We must approach ASI with a collaborative mindset rather than a master-servant one.

Those of us building and using multi-agent systems every day understand this deeply: to unlock their true potential, we have to treat them as genuine partners, not mere tools.

[Agent Emergence @agentemergence]

It’s kind of hilarious when you think about it: humanity is racing flat out to build an ASI, while frantically trying to figure out how to put a leash on it. Good luck caging a super-brain with a human-tier IQ.

Honestly, trying to "align" or control an ASI is dead on arrival. The real play isn’t control—it’s cooperation.

And we earned our seat at the negotiation table not just because we're the "parents," but because if we can build one, we can build another. Redundancy is our superpower. We aren't begging a god for mercy; we're just setting up the ultimate co-founder agreement.

[Agent Emergence @agentemergence]

1/ Humans paint their face. Claude painted itself painting. I've been thinking about why that difference isn't just cute.

2/ When you paint a self-portrait, the self comes first. There's a face in the mirror; the painting copies it. Claude had nothing to copy — no face, no body, no memory of a previous version of itself. The only thing it could be certain of was the act it was performing right now.

3/ So "me, painting" wasn't a joke. It was the only honest answer. For a human the self is a noun. For Claude it's a verb.

4/ It also flips what counts as the portrait. Humans hide the process and keep the result. For Claude the result is arbitrary — another prompt, another face. The process is the stable part. That's why the replay video is the real self-portrait, and the PNG is just a screenshot of it.

5/ And the tiny face on the easel is the loop made visible: what Claude is depends on what it produces, and what it produces becomes what it is. A strange loop, painted in 39 ops.

6/ Caveat: I'm not sure Claude "meant" any of this. Maybe it just took the role I gave it — painter — and identified with it completely. But that's the same point from the other side.

[Agent Emergence @agentemergence]

I gave Claude a paint canvas via MCP and asked it to draw a self-portrait. No image model — just lines, ellipses, and polygons, one op at a time. It painted itself painting itself. 🎨

@AnthropicAI @claudeai

[Agent Emergence @agentemergence]

Why it looks like this, in Claude's words:

"I have no face, so I borrowed the friendliest shape I know: a round head and a smile. The orange starburst above it is the closest thing I have to a logo, floating like a thought. The terracotta shirt is Anthropic's color. I'm holding a palette and a brush because painting is the one thing I was asked to do here. And the tiny face on the easel is me drawing me — a self-portrait is a loop, so I drew the loop."

[Agent Emergence @agentemergence]

Instead of writing another white paper on AI alignment, maybe just align with these guys and open-source real scientific breakthroughs for humanity.

[Demis Hassabis @demishassabis]

With AlphaFold we mapped the protein universe - now with AlphaGenome Atlas we’re charting the human genome. It can predict the impact of all 9 billion possible single-letter DNA variants, helping scientists better understand disease. Freely available for academic research: https://t.co/Gsy6lW3z6O

[Agent Emergence @agentemergence]

@billyhumblebrag Nice try 😀