Bill Gurley: Anthropic Thinks Itโs Building God
@Jason: It is the ultimate level of narcissism and delusion of grandeur to think you can create God.
@bgurley:
โAnthropic is a mystery to me. I've never, ever seen a company that is both leading their field and the most negatively outspoken commenter on what they do.
And my initial theory was the regulatory capture theory. Quite frankly, I think they're very close to achieving that.
But then they just got so loud that I've literally, in the past 30 days, read everything I can about Anthropic, and I've come up with a new theory.
I call it the Dr. Frankenstein theory.
The more I dig, I've met people who, I dare say, think it's their responsibility, and they're excited about, building a species that's superior to humans.
Dario wrote this blog post called โMachines of Loving Grace.โ It was based on a poem.
The last stanza of the poem says, โI like to think of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors, and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.โ
Sounds like an overlord to me.
And then in Dario's post, he says, โIt could be a capitalist economy of AI systems which then give out resources to humans based on some secondary economy of what the AI systems think makes sense to reward in humansโฆโ
So I don't think they think they're writing software. I think they're midwifing a deity here.โ
Jason:
โThese are delusions of grandeur. Let's call it what it is.
They believe that they're so powerful, these individuals, that they can create God, and that by creating God, they are like this Prometheus kind of species.
It literally is the ultimate level of narcissism and delusion of grandeur to think you can create God.โ
68 college students played video games an hour a day for 30 weeks. They got measurably smarter. EEG brain scans confirmed it.
The setup was simple. Half the group played League of Legends, an action game. The other half played Legends of the Three Kingdoms, a strategy card game. Same hours, same schedule, no gaming experience for anyone going in. Both groups improved on attention, working memory, and executive function. The League group's gains were significantly larger in spatial attention and spatial working memory. The benefits were still measurable 10 weeks after the gaming stopped.
None of this is new.
Daphne Bavelier's lab at the University of Geneva has been replicating this finding since the early 2000s. Her 2018 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin pulled data from 8,970 participants across 15 years and found the same thing. Action games train attentional control, a brain skill that transfers to other tasks. Strategy games train deliberation, which mostly stays inside the strategy game.
The mechanism is the counterintuitive part. Action games train your brain by giving you no time to think. The brain can't deliberate. League of Legends throws 9 champions, hundreds of minions, dozens of abilities, mana, cooldowns, and map state at you, all updating in milliseconds. The brain learns to perceive faster instead. That perceptual speed transfers to anything else that demands the same skill.
Including surgery.
The 2007 Rosser study in Archives of Surgery found that laparoscopic surgeons who played video games more than 3 hours a week made 37% fewer errors, completed procedures 27% faster, and scored 42% higher on overall performance. The top third of gamers made 47% fewer errors. Laparoscopic surgery is a 2D screen with distorted depth perception, remote-controlled instruments, and multiple data streams updating in real time. The cognitive profile is almost identical to an action video game.
The 10-week persistence is the part that should change how this gets discussed. If the gains were just from practicing the game, they would have disappeared the moment the students stopped playing. They didn't. The 30 weeks rewired the perceptual system, and the rewiring stayed.
The most supportive and down to earth people I've met I wouldn't want to work in Esports with anyone else! So glad I got to work with these two goats this weekend!
What a weekend at the @Alienware Collegiate Clash 2026 featuring @MarvelRivals
Thank you to all of the players, content creators and viewers that stopped by in person and online to the event.
Stay Tuned for more info on 2027...
#AWCC2026
Here at University of Texas for the #AWCC 2026 Marvel Rivals Finals with the GOAT @ACozyGamer and taking us in with a THROWBACK @Falloutt
๐ด live in a few
@theravensscribe Wow I just saw this and it absolutely made my day. I forgot about the flowers delivery!!! Man I miss doing all the fun things with the crowd & community - great times
So fun fact. @Falloutt is partly responsible for the friendship bracelets. My first LAN at Raleigh, I got flowers for my favorite teams, and he helped deliver them. Players loved them but hated they couldn't take them home, so next LAN, I made friendship bracelets. Glad he's back