This piece originally appeared at Hyperdimensional.
“One of the most remarkable aspects of this self-evolution is the emergence of sophisticated behaviors as the test-time computation increases. Behaviors such as reflection—where the model revisits and reevaluates its previous steps—and the exploration of alternative approaches to problem-solving arise spontaneously. These behaviors are not explicitly programmed but instead emerge as a result of the model’s interaction with the reinforcement learning environment.”
-DeepSeek r1 Technical Report
There’s a certain jitteriness to many of the people I know who work on AI research and policy. We bounce our legs under our desks, or tap our fingers on whatever surface is closest to our hands. Maybe AI attracts quirky and neurotic people (no—definitely). But I think the jitteriness comes from something deeper, too: an overwhelming sense of urgency, duty, and burden. And that sense, in turn, comes from the simple reality that we know something others do not.
It’s not that we understand something that others are not smart enough to get. It’s all pretty straightforward, actually. Mostly I think we are just early. Early to the insight that AI is going to overturn countless things about the status quo, including at least some things that most people like, or at least find comfortably familiar. Early to the idea that this technological revolution will be intense, chaotic, and filled with uncertainty. Early to the excitement, and early, I must admit, to the anxiety. Early to the knowledge that we are stepping into a novus ordo seclorum—a new order of the ages. And early to feeling all of this in our bones, rather than just understanding it in some abstract intellectual way.
It can be lonely at times. At family gatherings over the last two years, I’ve felt myself in somewhat of a daze—not so much because I am distracted by my X feed or my group chats, but because I just can’t shake the feeling that all of this is going to change in ways I cannot quite define. “Is there a word for feeling nostalgic for the time period you’re living through at the time you’re living it?,” Sam Altman once asked.
Continue reading at Hyperdimensional.
