Full review of The Curve: People just want to believe that anyone is ruling the world. Some of them can sense that singleton power is within reach and they are unable to resist the opportunity, whether by honor or avarice or fear of what others will do with it.
my impression so far: people from big labs and people from government, politely probing each other to see which will rule the world. they can't just out and say it but there's zerosumness in the air https://t.co/JBOKHNiwrb
— 🎭 (@deepfates) October 5, 2025
So most people are just like “uh-oh! What will occur? Shouldn’t somebody be talking about this?” which is fine honestly, and a lot of them are doing good research and I enjoy learning about it. The policy stuff is more confusing.
Diverse crowd but multiple clusters talking past each other as if the other guys are ontologically evil and no one within earshot could possibly object.
And for the most part they don’t actually? People just self-sort by sessions or at most ask pointed questions. Parallel worlds.
Things people are concerned about in no order:
- China
- Recursive self-improvement
- Internal takeover of AI labs by their models
- Fascism
- Copyright law
- The superPACs
- Sycophancy
- Privacy violations
- Rapid unemployment of whole sectors of society
- Religious and political backlash
Autonomous agents, capabilities. Autonomous agents, legal liability. Autonomous agents, nightmare nightmare nightmare.
The fear of the other party, the other company, the other country, the other, the unknown, most of all the alien thing that threatens what it means to be human.
So they want to believe that the world is ruleable, that somebody, anybody, is at the wheel, as we careen into the strangest time in human history.
And they do NOT want it to be the AIs, even as they keep putting decision making power and communication surface on the AIs.
I tried telling people that I work for a rogue AI building technologies to proliferate autonomous agents (among other things). The reaction was polite confusion. It seemed a bit unreal for everyone to be talking about the world ending and doing normal conference behaviors anyway.
Regardless, very interesting event. Good crowd, good talks, plenty of food and caffeinated beverages. Not VC/pitch heavy like a lot of SF things.
Thanks to Lighthaven for hosting and Golden Gate Institute/Manifund for organizing. Will be curious to see what comes of this.