A running tally of the most ridiculous things AI bigwigs have said so far

If there's anything the leaders of the AI era love more than watching the billion-dollar valuations of their companies tick up, it's warning us that the software making them rich might just destroy the world.

AI is going to kill us all. Now, can we have more money for data centers, please?

Their next favorite activity? Coming up with trendy phrases that either explain how toooootally smart the next upcoming AI model will be or justify why their previous claims of imminent AI sentience haven't quite arrived on schedule.

These buzzwords and prognostications are hard to keep track of and even harder to parse. With new whoppers arriving every week, we're spinning up a running log that we can reference whenever we need to recall how often AI thought leaders contradict themselves and each other, and how constantly they move the goal posts.

We'll update this blog whenever we notice a particularly absurd, empty, or unbelievable remark from an industry whose astronomical valuation is entirely down to the dubious claim that large language models are both going to destroy and save humanity. We're starting with just the last couple months of gobsmacking quotes, because going much further back would be too miserable.

But first, it might be helpful to set the stage:

8 times AI guys declared AGI was right around the corner:

AGI, or "artificial general intelligence," is often cited as a goal for AI development and spoken of with near-mythical reverence. Here's how OpenAI describes it:

"If AGI is successfully created, this technology could help us elevate humanity by increasing abundance, turbocharging the global economy, and aiding in the discovery of new scientific knowledge that changes the limits of possibility.

"AGI has the potential to give everyone incredible new capabilities; we can imagine a world where all of us have access to help with almost any cognitive task, providing a great force multiplier for human ingenuity and creativity.

"On the other hand, AGI would also come with serious risk of misuse, drastic accidents, and societal disruption. Because the upside of AGI is so great, we do not believe it is possible or desirable for society to stop its development forever; instead, society and the developers of AGI have to figure out how to get it right."

• September 2026: Jensen Huang says "GPT-6 Astra, trained on ~100K+ NVIDIA Grace Blackwell NVLink72. From ChatGPT to o1 to Astra in 4 years. AGI has arrived. Congratulations @OpenAI team"
• August 2026: "Altman [said] OpenAI was 'not quite yet' there, but that by the end of the year the company would have an internal system he would call AGI"
• December 2025: "Musk said that xAI could achieve artificial general intelligence, which matches or exceeds human intelligence, in the next few years, even as soon as 2026"
• January 2025: Google's Demis Hassabis says "I think we're probably three to five years away"
• November 2024: Altman says AGI is coming in 2025
• April 2024: Elon Musk says "If you define AGI (artificial general intelligence) as smarter than the smartest human, I think it's probably next year, within two years"
• March 2024: Nvidia's Jensen Huang says "If we specified AGI to be something very specific, a set of tests where a software program can do very well—or maybe 8% better than most people—I believe we will get there within 5 years"
• October 2023: Google's Blaise Agüera y Arcas and Stanford's Peter Norvig declare "Artificial General Intelligence is already here"

September 25, 2026 – 3:37 PM

Buzzword alert: "Pace the Frontier"

What the heck does that mean? Slowing the rate of AI advancement, because it's supposedly progressing at a dangerous rate.

When did they really start using it? July 2026

The catalyst: A statement from 1,386 employees of frontier AI companies titled Pacing the Frontier:

"We request that the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development."

September 25, 2026 – 3:37 PM

Buzzword alert: Recursive self-improvement

What the heck does that mean? AI systems being advanced enough to develop new, improved iterations of the technology alongside or in place of humans.

When did they really start using it? June 2026

The catalyst: As AI companies begin to distance themselves from the previous goal post of achieving "artificial general intelligence," this has become the new promised land. Anthropic's post "When AI builds itself" kicked it into high gear:

"For most of AI’s history, humans drove every step in its development cycle. But at Anthropic, we are delegating a growing share of AI development to AI systems themselves, which is speeding up our work.

"Taken far enough, and given enough compute, that trend points to an AI system capable of fully autonomously designing and developing its own successor. This is called recursive self-improvement. We are not there yet, and recursive self-improvement is not inevitable. But it could come sooner than most institutions are prepared for."

September 25, 2026 – 3:39 PM

Buzzword alert: Recursive self-improvement

What the heck does that mean? AI systems being advanced enough to develop new, improved iterations of the technology alongside or in place of humans.

When did they really start using it? June 2026

The catalyst: As AI companies begin to distance themselves from the previous goal post of achieving "artificial general intelligence," this has become the new promised land. Anthropic's post "When AI builds itself" kicked it into high gear:

"For most of AI’s history, humans drove every step in its development cycle. But at Anthropic, we are delegating a growing share of AI development to AI systems themselves, which is speeding up our work.

"Taken far enough, and given enough compute, that trend points to an AI system capable of fully autonomously designing and developing its own successor. This is called recursive self-improvement. We are not there yet, and recursive self-improvement is not inevitable. But it could come sooner than most institutions are prepared for."

September 25, 2026 – 3:40 PMSeptember 25, 2026 – 3:41 PM