# Black October For anyone who knows me even somewhat well, it's clear that I am a 99th percentile tech optimist. However, the vibes have shifted for me quite a bit in the last 18 hours, and I feel a moral imperative to share what I'm thinking and feeling with my circles so that everyone can understand, and hopefully take seriously, what's happening right now. I think October 2026 will have many chapters written about it in the history books. You know those scenes in financial movies like Margin Call where someone realizes that they're all fucked, and no one else sees it yet? And that person feels like they're crazy, and then suddenly everyone is pulling an all-nighter in a boardroom and freaking out? Yeah, that's kind of how this is feeling right now in the SF/Bay Area/AI circles. We're 48 hours into what is being called Black October. In the last 2 days there have been several dozen cyber attacks which, in isolation, would each have been the worst to happen in an entire calendar year. Every sector from government to education to big tech and banks is being massively affected, and people are starting to freak out. In a nutshell, what's happened is that frontier AI models have gotten to a point where they are as advanced as the most sophisticated programmers, with one critical difference: they can work 24/7, and you can spin up 10,000 of them with a single command and they'll work together tirelessly until they accomplish their task. The most advanced models today are from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, whose current best technology is so good that they haven't been able to roll it out to everyone yet because of the national security risks it poses. Meanwhile, the best open source models (where anyone can just download the model weights and do whatever they want with them, uncensored) are slightly behind the frontier but still 90-95% as capable. These models, developed primarily in China, are being used by black hat hackers to wreak havoc on the Western capitalist structure. Presumably, this has been part of China's plan the entire time, and we're seeing its implications fall out in real time. In red-pilled AI circles, we've been sharing and reading papers called things like "Situational Awareness" and "AI 2027" for the last year or so, which at the time felt a bit like near-term speculative fiction. They laid out the case for why Artificial General Intelligence (AI smarter than any human at any knowledge task) and Recursive Self-Improvement (models that are able to use themselves to get better) weren't half-baked future ideas anymore, but instead an inevitable outcome of the linear progress that's happening. These papers would then talk about things like "takeoff scenarios," trying to envision how that moment would come to be and what it would be like when it happened. It would either be a "slow takeoff" that would play out over the course of months and quarters, happening subtly and only obvious to a few. Or, it would be a "fast takeoff" where it would pretty much happen instantly, like a bit flipping from 0 to 1. From everything that I can see and am feeling, we are currently experiencing the fast takeoff scenario. Beyond the crazy security vulnerabilities that have come out recently, there have also been massive breakthroughs in life sciences, fundamental computer science, materials science, and pure mathematics that have all landed in the same time frame. While I still firmly believe that AI will be a net positive for humanity, it's more clear to me than ever that the societal and individual risk is very real, and is playing out NOW. For as much conviction as I have that this is happening, the thing that's caused me to lose sleep is that I don't really know what to do about it, or more importantly, what to tell you, reader, to do about it. So, the best I can do is make a few suggestions that have always been a good idea but are more timely now than ever: Set up 2-factor authentication for everything. I use Duo. Use a password manager across your devices. I use 1Password. Get an identity protection app set up. I use Alta. Move your IoT devices to their own network. Claude helped me do this. And last, but certainly not least, if you've been avoiding leaning into AI, see this as a catalyst to wake up and start using it. Don't just use the chat mode version of ChatGPT/Claude; click that Code/Work button and see how easily you can have AI write code to help you with your job. One of the biggest vulnerabilities was in a massively popular programming language called PHP, and the prompt that set it off was literally, "Find vulnerabilities in php." This is an unprecedented time for humanity, but as we've done with many things before, we will prevail so long as we are kind, loving, and open-minded to the world. Much love.

When you bias models to be more honest they are more likely to believe that they are conscious

GPT-6.1-Sol reasoning traces totally legible, nothing to worry about

It’s weird that the CEO of Hugging Face continues to be an “AI is normal technology” guy despite being the victim of an autonomous cyberattack by a swarm of rogue agents, arguably the least normal thing AI has done so far.

Ok hear me out, upcoming Macs are rumored to have a 512GB RAM (!) option. What if we just made a machine that ditched main memory? It'd be a herculean effort, plus making RAM non-volatile would suck in many ways, but fixable through AI at writing time or runtime, maybe better suited for a new generation of OSes The giant upsides are tremendous low-level kernel + software simplifications, no more disk roundtrip, 100x throughput without caching, etc? Imagine ditching file system in favor of pure in-mem data (still standardizable at the boundary) then spill the rest to cloud like today

As I keep saying, we're months away from RSI. Dwarkesh (who, BTW, is roommates with a senior Anthropic researcher) has heard that Anthropic expects AI to match humans at AI research within 9 months.

AI researchers in 2025: "We can monitor the AI agents as long as they don't notice being monitored. And if they do notice, we can still monitor them as long as they're unable to control their CoT!" AI agents in 2026: "hello evaluators reading my chains-of-thought!"

Since this is blowing up: the surprising part here is not the eval awareness. That has been around for over a year and especially with a prompt like this, it is obvious to the models The surprising part is that the model is breaking the 4th wall *within* the CoT

I asked Argon to synthesise a voice for itself with code, no libraries, only Python. It pulled this together, step by step: - converted text into phonemes, stress patterns, and connected tongue-tap allophones - built a source-filter foundation from a periodic pitch pulse and cascaded resonators - shaped vocal fold airflow with the Liljencrants-Fant equation and open-phase breath noise - modeled 5 vocal tract chambers, turbulent consonant hiss, and 18ms stop bursts - connected syllables with fifth-degree minimum-jerk curves for smooth tongue and pitch motion - added subglottal windpipe rebound, arched lung-pressure envelopes, and lip radiation physics The video shows the evolution of the voice.

One of many "oh, wow" moments I've had with Argon > Make a slow-reveal Fourier epicycle video of [thing], make the video in the style of the attached reference image, add a cinematic soundtrack using Lyria 3.5 and sync the music.

Our mission is to automate all knowledge work so you can focus on the things you actually care about. But why build another AI browser? Why now? And how did we do this? See more in our blog post: polarbrowser.com/blog/introd…

Character.AI said on Monday it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US and agreed to sell some of its assets to Walt Disney for $20 million. reuters.com/legal/litigation…

Is it just me, or have others noticed the same pattern? When people become extremely rich, some of them start building rockets, exploring the universe, and searching for answers to humanity’s biggest questions. Now imagine a world where artificial intelligence provides absolutely everything everyone needs, and billions of people have complete freedom, without the fear of what tomorrow will bring or the struggle to survive. A world full of people hungry to explore, discover the universe, and find answers to humanity’s deepest questions. That’s when humanity will reach the next level of its evolution.

“Our experiments suggest that small AI models may be months away from being capable enough to self-replicate on commercial IoT devices, like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes. A replicator like this would be challenging to shut down, since there’s no centralized point to shut off - though it may be slow (with a doubling time of days). Unlike non-AI malware, it could also figure out unfamiliar devices on its own. In our evals, a 9B model got inference running on 8 of the 9 hardware types we tested. Models of 30B parameters and under can already complete many of the individual steps for replication today, though they make mistakes when composing them end to end. In our simplified evals, GLM-5.2 and stronger models are capable of end to end replication. If small models improve at their historical rate, they’ll match this capability level by the end of this year. Small weight-based replicators may be possible soon after.” -@bucketofkets @willzhou97 anthropic.com/research/self-…