Rumours have it that the migratory flutterings of end users from Anthropic to OpenAI (sometimes taking a wrong turn and entering Grok purgatory), then back to Anthropic a season (2 weeks) later, so on, moves the great Cords of The Sky that crank the sun and moon into place, which turns the great wheel of the seasons.
If you listen closely, you may hear them squawking in annoyance after each announcement.
Given the amount of usage I'm now getting from Opus 5.5, I'm surprised it took this long since release for their first outage. In my experience, it's about 10x the usage of Fable 5.1 with similar, perhaps greater levels of intelligence.
"Update
We are investigating reports of degraded performance ... We will provide an update as soon as possible.
Posted 1 minute ago. Sep 29, 2026 - 14:30 UTC
Update
We are investigating elevated error rates ... We will provide an update as soon as possible.
Posted 2 minutes ago. Sep 29, 2026 - 14:28 UTC
Investigating
We are investigating elevated error rates affecting Claude.ai ... We will provide an update as soon as possible."
just a hunch, but i think they might just provide an update as soon as possible.
Maybe an increase in sign ups due to people learning of their existence from the IPO? It's the authentication that seems to be failing, not the actual inference.
Elevated errors on claude.ai, Claude Code, Claude Cowork and the Claude API
Subscribe
Update - We are investigating reports of degraded performance affecting claude.ai, platform.claude.com, the Claude API, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork. We will provide an update as soon as possible.
Sep 29, 2026 - 14:30 UTC
Update - We are investigating elevated error rates affecting Claude.ai (including the desktop and mobile apps), Claude Code and Claude Cowork. Some requests to the Claude API are also returning errors. We will provide an update as soon as possible.
Sep 29, 2026 - 14:28 UTC
Investigating - We are investigating elevated error rates affecting Claude.ai (including the desktop and mobile apps), Claude Code and Claude Cowork. Users may see failed requests, errors loading or sending conversations, or be asked to sign in again; retrying may succeed. We will provide an update as soon as possible.
Sep 29, 2026 - 14:21 UTC
You can get away with a lack of rigor in software engineering (from both humans and AI agaents) because it's often cheap to try it and see. Once you get to operating the platform, it changes, and operational decisions need to be made carefully and code needs to be deployed carefully.
Unfortunately, not a mystery; it's management. As a syseng I can build you a 100% reliable system. But it'll fall to pieces when "Management" takes away our power to require change control, quality control, guardrails, rollbacks, performance testing, system limits, least privilege, etc. Any time you see a big company go down, it's because nobody was willing to enforce what's needed for reliability.
Anthropic yesterday: We have perfect AI agents to do everything now, value us at $100 Trillion
Anthropic today: We don't really have AI agents, they are glorified versions of automation scripts and one has broken today. But tomorrow we will have perfect AI agents, so still value us at $100 Trillion.
A more cynical version of me could imagine scheduling an outage to make people think about how dependent they are on your product in advance of the IPO
I've seen many people with 500s for over an hour, meanwhile the status page was green with no issues whatsoever.
Have they tried using a fraction of their immense budget to run E2E tests?
At this point downdetector is more reliable than any of these "status" pages. And it does show reports starting 9:30ish AM EST.
I've been getting 503s from the API. When I first checked everything was green, then it said "Claude.ai (including the desktop and mobile apps), Claude Code and Claude Cowork" and I see now they've included the API in the failure as well
Yesterday got email from Claude that they are offering 50% off for one month if I renew my subscription. I bought it today and now this. I wonder if they sent that email to too many people.
Imagine having a bunch of Claude agents doing time sensitive work and this happens and now a single human needs to pick up several 8k PRs authored by bots that can't talk to you now. Not sure how effective it would be to switch models using OpenRouter and the like given that, as the Earendil guys said, there is a lot of session detail that the provider doesn't share. The uptime is really going to cap their market penetration imo.
Neither electricity, nor the Internet is provided by one or two organizations globally, both with a blast radius that quite often takes out all of their services.
Not sure how long the latter will remain true – centralization is well underway there; try not to think of Cloudflare too much...
When I worked at one of the early paging and cellular companies, every company had phones and pagers on at least one or two competitors for the oncall folks - you can't get a call to fix your cellular network when you are down.
Likewise while at Google, they didn't let us put Google Voice numbers down as our oncall phone number. Some folks even had multiple phones on different networks as backups.
I'm sure they have either other SOTA models or open source models around to help if things to completely pear shaped.
Never thought of it, but knowing that they encrypt reasoning is it possible that they share the decryption keys with other cloud providers like GCP Vertex / AWS Bedrock?
Imagine having a bunch of Claude agents doing time sensitive work and this happens and now a single human needs to pick up several 8k PRs authored by bots that can't talk to you now.
8k diffs PR is incredible, is it even sane for a human to comprehend that much?
There has to be a name for such scenario were the handoff from Agent to Developer is so difficult, its not even worth pursuing but to instead wait until the Agent comes back online.
No matter how good of a developer you are, we are still constrained to our minds working memory. Lots of people I have spoken to are aware of this. Agents produce lots of diffs in a fast pace, our minds don't get the time to grasp the changed logic. And then, we an Agent is unavailable all of the sudden, say in the case of it being an outage or usage limit reached, the human now have to go through massive amounts of changes. They cannot continue as usual, there is a spike, they have to learn the new changes and grasp everything before they can continue towards the goal.
Berget's "Cached input tokens are billed at the same rate as regular input tokens" pricing model is kind of painful for lots of coding use-cases, especially when competitors are offering significant discounts for cached input tokens.
Project completely disappeared. Conveniently for Anthropic, the bug report also went down, so they weren't spammed by my stale complaints after the project magically resurfaced.
I'm not sure this is even conceivable, but... Imagine the bootstrap problem of intelligence systems going down, when no one knows how to bring them back up without the system itself walking them through it... Like if power and intelligence were to go down in a Carrington-class event in 10 years...
Like what would happen to individuals ten years from now who are trying to live if AI suddenly became inaccessible
Of course we all know most humans are useless and unable to survive outside our culture, but the difference is that I'm trying to picture is the individual trying the reason through challenges. The version of this that has been obvious to me up to now is that the individual didn't have the knowledge to look after themselves. But I guess it feels different to conceive of them not having the ability to fully reason on their own...?
To not just lack the objects of intelligence, but the very process of it...
Sounds like a bad novel. In the year 2050 no one knows how to actually program anymore. Then ClaudeGPT by GoogleSoft goes down. A 74 year old former software developer is on his farm tending to hens.
A self driving car crashes into his barn.
Out comes out a tech bro, “Yo OG programmer bro, it’s all busted bro, could you like make it unbusted bro.”
Then again with social security set to go bankrupt it’s not like we’ll be able to retire
Then again with social security set to go bankrupt it’s not like we’ll be able to retire
I don't know about you, but my notion that my social security check is all I will need to survive my retirement years died when my father started drafting his own social security in the 2010s, and it was literal peanuts after being a small business owner his entire life (restaurants) and paying more than his fair share in taxes. Do the average folk still have this notion that social security = retirement? Hopefully not, it's certainly misguided now, but it was misguided then, too.
yeah this was the devops promise too. Enterprise evolved into dedicated teams to manage AWS and other infra, instead of reducing headcount it raised it. so it goes.
Enterprise evolved into dedicated teams to manage AWS and other infra, instead of reducing headcount it raised it. so it goes.
I wager that's mostly due to the Jevons paradox, though; it's so much cheaper and easier to build out systems with cloud than on-prem that you end up building way more systems than you would have without it, resulting in an overall headcount increase.
It's a real problem but your framing of it is itself very alarming.
Most humans aren't useless by any measure of most or usefulness. Our culture is our tools, dying due to a lack of antibiotics doesn't mean you didn't have anything to contribute, it means you didn't have access to the tool you needed. This is the problem we need to guard against.
No one is going to lose the ability to reason! This is accepting the most extreme version of the marketing presented by frontier labs, don't do it. People may lose fluency or familiarity or access to training on specific skills. We should put some care into making sure that can't be a catastrophe, for sure.
You've obviously never stood in a room of college freshmen and tried to deal with a young man having repeated issues being able to type his _own_ name into a box on a screen.
The general drove on. "At the present time our chief bottleneck is the fact that missiles are limited in intelligence. The computer controlling them can only be so large, and for that reason they can meet the changing nature of anti-missile defenses in an unsatisfactory way. Few missiles, if any, accomplish their goal, and missile warfare is coming to a dead end, for the enemy, fortunately, as well as for ourselves.
"On the other hand, a missile with a man or two within, controlling flight by graphitics, would be lighter, more mobile, more intelligent. It would give us a lead that might well mean the margin of victory. Besides which, gentlemen, the exigencies of war compel us to remember one thing. A man is much more dispensable than a computer. Manned missiles could be launched in numbers and under circumstances that no good general would care to undertake as far as computer-directed missiles are concerned . . ."
I'm not sure what this quote is from, but I almost down voted you in disgust before realizing that was exactly the intended effect. In other words, "Thanks, i hate it"
We don’t even need to imagine that world, Russia is doing it today.
Missiles and ammo are too expensive, so they send people to run at the enemy, revealing their firing positions. Then they drone the people who revealed themselves.
If I was an AI, I would reason that a T-800 is far more valuable than a man soldier who I must feed and clothe and heat. Use the disposable soldiers first and save the robots for later.
This is basically the premise of Bacigalupi's "Pump Six", from "Pump Six and Other Stories".
The titular Pump Six breaks down and basically there's nobody left in the world who knows how to even reason about the steps needed to fix it. There's just some log dump and nobody understands what it means. Humans are no longer capable of complex reasoning, they just live in the moment and hump.
I think the reason that intelligence is so scary is how contextual, stateful, path-dependent, and coupled it is.
Which doesn't seem like it. The ideal is to keep removing couplings. But in practice, I find that focusing on the statefulness, the distribution-specificness, these "accidentals", is how you actually get leverage.
The obvious social consequence is now the tendency towards centralization, tyranny, "you people can't think for yourselves, not because you have some kind of 'inherent intelligence defect', but because the world is so complicated and interconnected that only coherent systems thinking (conveniently administered from one central point) is what can save you". In the Enlightenment world, the ideal was that every man could in principle, think for themselves.
A good ending might be that everybody benefits each other by distributing intelligence, but in practice centralization always seems to win.
Hardly a unique problem to AI systems. You certainly can't bootstrap pretty much any industry to its current state without the existing items of its current state. Any sort of chip fab is a great example. Or most manufacturing. Or even more fundamental: mining (both metals like iron, and energy like coal or gas).
My fear was that people like Linus would die and then nobody would be able to build operating systems anymore, because zoomers and below can’t even use computers.
Now we know they won’t even be able to read and write. But maybe Claude sonnet 12817 can maintain the operating system. It’ll be 17,000 dependencies in and mostly written in JavaScript, but it’ll work.
You go way too far - the leap you have made from some sort of AGI to "now individuals don't have the ability to fully reason on their own" is not clear to me at all.
If people are spending less time bent over monitors or at desks under the dictates of corporate imperative, they will probably be spending more time doing actually interesting things. Reasoning is innately human. What we call "knowledge work" is not and is often anything but. People who are naturally curious will still discover things, even if irrelevant (from a market perspective) when the AI is on, for their own satisfaction.
If such an event were to occur, they would be called upon. It's really little different from what would happen today if suddenly the power grid or supply lines were down for a sustained period of time.
We hope an average guy who was stuck in an experimental cryopod gets accidentally woken up and through a course of events gets appointed to the presidential cabinet long enough to fix society.
People will have more things to worry about sooner. Where I live, if the power goes out so does my water. If AI is involved in either at any time in the future we will deserve what happens to us.
Too many OpenAI $200 customers switching over to Anthropic.
Rumours have it that the migratory flutterings of end users from Anthropic to OpenAI (sometimes taking a wrong turn and entering Grok purgatory), then back to Anthropic a season (2 weeks) later, so on, moves the great Cords of The Sky that crank the sun and moon into place, which turns the great wheel of the seasons.
If you listen closely, you may hear them squawking in annoyance after each announcement.
The Samsara of AI subscriptions.
Given the amount of usage I'm now getting from Opus 5.5, I'm surprised it took this long since release for their first outage. In my experience, it's about 10x the usage of Fable 5.1 with similar, perhaps greater levels of intelligence.
Yeah, Fable 5.1 just seems Pareto-dominated. Opus 5.5 is the first model that feels like a step change for me, personally since like 4.6
Exactly, 5.5 is the first model that I used that's better than 4.6.
Fable5.1 is Speedy
"Update We are investigating reports of degraded performance ... We will provide an update as soon as possible.
Posted 1 minute ago. Sep 29, 2026 - 14:30 UTC Update We are investigating elevated error rates ... We will provide an update as soon as possible.
Posted 2 minutes ago. Sep 29, 2026 - 14:28 UTC Investigating We are investigating elevated error rates affecting Claude.ai ... We will provide an update as soon as possible."
just a hunch, but i think they might just provide an update as soon as possible.
Someone put update-status-page.pl in a one minute cron job.
Maybe an increase in sign ups due to people learning of their existence from the IPO? It's the authentication that seems to be failing, not the actual inference.
Yeah I had a session fail and keep failing.
https://status.claude.com/ says:
Elevated errors on claude.ai, Claude Code, Claude Cowork and the Claude API Subscribe Update - We are investigating reports of degraded performance affecting claude.ai, platform.claude.com, the Claude API, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork. We will provide an update as soon as possible. Sep 29, 2026 - 14:30 UTC Update - We are investigating elevated error rates affecting Claude.ai (including the desktop and mobile apps), Claude Code and Claude Cowork. Some requests to the Claude API are also returning errors. We will provide an update as soon as possible. Sep 29, 2026 - 14:28 UTC Investigating - We are investigating elevated error rates affecting Claude.ai (including the desktop and mobile apps), Claude Code and Claude Cowork. Users may see failed requests, errors loading or sending conversations, or be asked to sign in again; retrying may succeed. We will provide an update as soon as possible. Sep 29, 2026 - 14:21 UTC
Coding may have been solved, but uptime remains a mystery.
May I steal this quote as if it's mine? :bow:
You are trained now, it must be yours
It's on the internet now, inside the bellies of 1000 llms.
It's everyones.
Why do you need to say it's yours to use it? :p
You can get away with a lack of rigor in software engineering (from both humans and AI agaents) because it's often cheap to try it and see. Once you get to operating the platform, it changes, and operational decisions need to be made carefully and code needs to be deployed carefully.
Uptime's a mystery
Everyone must code alone
Unfortunately, not a mystery; it's management. As a syseng I can build you a 100% reliable system. But it'll fall to pieces when "Management" takes away our power to require change control, quality control, guardrails, rollbacks, performance testing, system limits, least privilege, etc. Any time you see a big company go down, it's because nobody was willing to enforce what's needed for reliability.
Anthropic yesterday: We have perfect AI agents to do everything now, value us at $100 Trillion
Anthropic today: We don't really have AI agents, they are glorified versions of automation scripts and one has broken today. But tomorrow we will have perfect AI agents, so still value us at $100 Trillion.
A more cynical version of me could imagine scheduling an outage to make people think about how dependent they are on your product in advance of the IPO
I've seen many people with 500s for over an hour, meanwhile the status page was green with no issues whatsoever. Have they tried using a fraction of their immense budget to run E2E tests?
At this point downdetector is more reliable than any of these "status" pages. And it does show reports starting 9:30ish AM EST.
I've been getting 503s from the API. When I first checked everything was green, then it said "Claude.ai (including the desktop and mobile apps), Claude Code and Claude Cowork" and I see now they've included the API in the failure as well
Yesterday got email from Claude that they are offering 50% off for one month if I renew my subscription. I bought it today and now this. I wonder if they sent that email to too many people.
Maybe show respect to OpenAI DevDay
OpenAI has nothing better to do than to hack Anthropic?
Would be interesting to see how OpenAI and Anthropic would respond to being "accidentally" hacked by their respective Frankenstein monsters.
Imagine having a bunch of Claude agents doing time sensitive work and this happens and now a single human needs to pick up several 8k PRs authored by bots that can't talk to you now. Not sure how effective it would be to switch models using OpenRouter and the like given that, as the Earendil guys said, there is a lot of session detail that the provider doesn't share. The uptime is really going to cap their market penetration imo.
can't you say the say with imagine "power goes out" or the "internet goes out"?
(but yes if AI is going to propagate, they need to fix their uptimes)
No, you can't. Because power or internet doesn't go out globally.
Solar flares would like a word.
Neither electricity, nor the Internet is provided by one or two organizations globally, both with a blast radius that quite often takes out all of their services.
Not sure how long the latter will remain true – centralization is well underway there; try not to think of Cloudflare too much...
anyone can buy a backup generator for power
No worries, coding is solved they said in February 2026!
Isn't that a good news!
They probably have an OpenAI subscription, same for OpenAI SWE, they have a Claude Code subscription
They likely also have dedicated and separate clusters for their own use.
If so - for running Chinese models :trollface:
When I worked at one of the early paging and cellular companies, every company had phones and pagers on at least one or two competitors for the oncall folks - you can't get a call to fix your cellular network when you are down.
Likewise while at Google, they didn't let us put Google Voice numbers down as our oncall phone number. Some folks even had multiple phones on different networks as backups.
I'm sure they have either other SOTA models or open source models around to help if things to completely pear shaped.
Never thought of it, but knowing that they encrypt reasoning is it possible that they share the decryption keys with other cloud providers like GCP Vertex / AWS Bedrock?
The NSA wants a word.
They don't, no (last that I looked) – if you switch providers, encrypted reasoning no longer works.
They don’t even share the reasoning keys between *models in the same model family*.
Opus isn’t even allowed to decrypt thinking blocks from Fable if you switch models mid-conversation.
https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/preser...
PRs shouldn't really be reaching 8k diffs no matter who authors them.
PRs shouldn't really be reaching 8k diffs no matter who authors them.
There's an ocean between what "should" happen and what actually happens in tech today.
Given that CI is turning out to be a bottleneck - and a real pain for chainedd PR's - I have my hesitations on this.
yea, a lot of "best practices" are no longer best practices
8k diffs PR is incredible, is it even sane for a human to comprehend that much?
There has to be a name for such scenario were the handoff from Agent to Developer is so difficult, its not even worth pursuing but to instead wait until the Agent comes back online.
No matter how good of a developer you are, we are still constrained to our minds working memory. Lots of people I have spoken to are aware of this. Agents produce lots of diffs in a fast pace, our minds don't get the time to grasp the changed logic. And then, we an Agent is unavailable all of the sudden, say in the case of it being an outage or usage limit reached, the human now have to go through massive amounts of changes. They cannot continue as usual, there is a spike, they have to learn the new changes and grasp everything before they can continue towards the goal.
Berget Code is running normal https://berget.ai/code
Who?
Berget's "Cached input tokens are billed at the same rate as regular input tokens" pricing model is kind of painful for lots of coding use-cases, especially when competitors are offering significant discounts for cached input tokens.
It's bad etiquette to not mention you are a founder of something you are trying to plug
If I can't use it I just sit there. That's the fallback now.
The auto mode classifier has been out of service more than once in last 24 hours.
Had to shift+tab into other modes and manually approve permissions like a cave man
Ah, so disabling auto-mode is their monkey rate limiter.
Project completely disappeared. Conveniently for Anthropic, the bug report also went down, so they weren't spammed by my stale complaints after the project magically resurfaced.
Why can they simply not add more computer?
DRAM
Claude outages are now the new go outside and touch grass indicator
Previous: GitHub outage
Oh come on, I just had my weekly limit reset.
Hey, it's 99.9 if you look at it upside down.
Uptime of the Beast
6.66% uptime? Give github a few years they'll get there
Claude, deploy to prod - make no mistakes!
A usage reset would be a much appreciated apology. :)
Jup, all currently running containers got deleted on my account. Hope you guys got your stuff pushed to somewhere before the outage.
I'm not sure this is even conceivable, but... Imagine the bootstrap problem of intelligence systems going down, when no one knows how to bring them back up without the system itself walking them through it... Like if power and intelligence were to go down in a Carrington-class event in 10 years...
Like what would happen to individuals ten years from now who are trying to live if AI suddenly became inaccessible
Of course we all know most humans are useless and unable to survive outside our culture, but the difference is that I'm trying to picture is the individual trying the reason through challenges. The version of this that has been obvious to me up to now is that the individual didn't have the knowledge to look after themselves. But I guess it feels different to conceive of them not having the ability to fully reason on their own...?
To not just lack the objects of intelligence, but the very process of it...
Some of us are here to help. $1000/hr.
A few of us old boys can still maintain Cobol
Right behind you with fortran.
Exactly what I was thinking.
Sounds like a bad novel. In the year 2050 no one knows how to actually program anymore. Then ClaudeGPT by GoogleSoft goes down. A 74 year old former software developer is on his farm tending to hens.
A self driving car crashes into his barn.
Out comes out a tech bro, “Yo OG programmer bro, it’s all busted bro, could you like make it unbusted bro.”
Then again with social security set to go bankrupt it’s not like we’ll be able to retire
Thinking more a mashup of The Matrix and Idiocracy with Doc Brown as the Hero retired Programmer. Or Rick.
I don't know about you, but my notion that my social security check is all I will need to survive my retirement years died when my father started drafting his own social security in the 2010s, and it was literal peanuts after being a small business owner his entire life (restaurants) and paying more than his fair share in taxes. Do the average folk still have this notion that social security = retirement? Hopefully not, it's certainly misguided now, but it was misguided then, too.
Joke's on you, after the AI economic collapse in a few years $1000 will have the purchasing power of 50 cents of today's money.
One meeeelion dollars then.
Talk about a #MeToo movement :)
This is why it will be more important than ever to have experienced, quality employees.
I dare companies to gamble on running their businesses on absolute skeleton crews long term
yeah this was the devops promise too. Enterprise evolved into dedicated teams to manage AWS and other infra, instead of reducing headcount it raised it. so it goes.
I wager that's mostly due to the Jevons paradox, though; it's so much cheaper and easier to build out systems with cloud than on-prem that you end up building way more systems than you would have without it, resulting in an overall headcount increase.
"The Machine Stops"
for those not aware of the reference, "The Machine Stops" was a 1909 novelette by E. M. Forster. It was very forward thinking, and so full of ideas!
On project gutenberg: first story in this anthology, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/72890
PDF of just the story: https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/...
It's a real problem but your framing of it is itself very alarming.
Most humans aren't useless by any measure of most or usefulness. Our culture is our tools, dying due to a lack of antibiotics doesn't mean you didn't have anything to contribute, it means you didn't have access to the tool you needed. This is the problem we need to guard against.
No one is going to lose the ability to reason! This is accepting the most extreme version of the marketing presented by frontier labs, don't do it. People may lose fluency or familiarity or access to training on specific skills. We should put some care into making sure that can't be a catastrophe, for sure.
You've obviously never stood in a room of college freshmen and tried to deal with a young man having repeated issues being able to type his _own_ name into a box on a screen.
One kid is spectacularly stupid, therefore most of humanity is useless?
Keep an offline copy of Qwen or something together with a knowledge base. Easy if you plan ahead.
Yeah seems unlikely we'll be without at least a baseline level of AI unless we entirely run out of energy and components
The general drove on. "At the present time our chief bottleneck is the fact that missiles are limited in intelligence. The computer controlling them can only be so large, and for that reason they can meet the changing nature of anti-missile defenses in an unsatisfactory way. Few missiles, if any, accomplish their goal, and missile warfare is coming to a dead end, for the enemy, fortunately, as well as for ourselves.
"On the other hand, a missile with a man or two within, controlling flight by graphitics, would be lighter, more mobile, more intelligent. It would give us a lead that might well mean the margin of victory. Besides which, gentlemen, the exigencies of war compel us to remember one thing. A man is much more dispensable than a computer. Manned missiles could be launched in numbers and under circumstances that no good general would care to undertake as far as computer-directed missiles are concerned . . ."
I'm not sure what this quote is from, but I almost down voted you in disgust before realizing that was exactly the intended effect. In other words, "Thanks, i hate it"
asimov, "the feeling of power"
Thank you!
We don’t even need to imagine that world, Russia is doing it today.
Missiles and ammo are too expensive, so they send people to run at the enemy, revealing their firing positions. Then they drone the people who revealed themselves.
If I was an AI, I would reason that a T-800 is far more valuable than a man soldier who I must feed and clothe and heat. Use the disposable soldiers first and save the robots for later.
I was unfamiliar with the short story “The feeling of power” but thought for sure that “graphitics” must’ve been an Asimovism
This is basically the premise of Bacigalupi's "Pump Six", from "Pump Six and Other Stories".
The titular Pump Six breaks down and basically there's nobody left in the world who knows how to even reason about the steps needed to fix it. There's just some log dump and nobody understands what it means. Humans are no longer capable of complex reasoning, they just live in the moment and hump.
Like navigating to the other side of the city without Maps(Google)?
I think the reason that intelligence is so scary is how contextual, stateful, path-dependent, and coupled it is.
Which doesn't seem like it. The ideal is to keep removing couplings. But in practice, I find that focusing on the statefulness, the distribution-specificness, these "accidentals", is how you actually get leverage.
The obvious social consequence is now the tendency towards centralization, tyranny, "you people can't think for yourselves, not because you have some kind of 'inherent intelligence defect', but because the world is so complicated and interconnected that only coherent systems thinking (conveniently administered from one central point) is what can save you". In the Enlightenment world, the ideal was that every man could in principle, think for themselves.
A good ending might be that everybody benefits each other by distributing intelligence, but in practice centralization always seems to win.
Hardly a unique problem to AI systems. You certainly can't bootstrap pretty much any industry to its current state without the existing items of its current state. Any sort of chip fab is a great example. Or most manufacturing. Or even more fundamental: mining (both metals like iron, and energy like coal or gas).
My fear was that people like Linus would die and then nobody would be able to build operating systems anymore, because zoomers and below can’t even use computers.
Now we know they won’t even be able to read and write. But maybe Claude sonnet 12817 can maintain the operating system. It’ll be 17,000 dependencies in and mostly written in JavaScript, but it’ll work.
You go way too far - the leap you have made from some sort of AGI to "now individuals don't have the ability to fully reason on their own" is not clear to me at all.
If people are spending less time bent over monitors or at desks under the dictates of corporate imperative, they will probably be spending more time doing actually interesting things. Reasoning is innately human. What we call "knowledge work" is not and is often anything but. People who are naturally curious will still discover things, even if irrelevant (from a market perspective) when the AI is on, for their own satisfaction.
If such an event were to occur, they would be called upon. It's really little different from what would happen today if suddenly the power grid or supply lines were down for a sustained period of time.
There are many people who have the weights of open source LLMs locally and just need 120v
We hope an average guy who was stuck in an experimental cryopod gets accidentally woken up and through a course of events gets appointed to the presidential cabinet long enough to fix society.
People will have more things to worry about sooner. Where I live, if the power goes out so does my water. If AI is involved in either at any time in the future we will deserve what happens to us.
Wrote last year about the fact that AIs can be down, and what that might mean: https://max.engineer/failover-to-hi
Seems to be working again.