On: OpenAI’s next big AI model has ‘entered the AGI era’

3 September, in the year of the announcement

They have declared a new age. Not the Church declaring it, not the emperor, but a company of merchants declaring themselves the measure of their own miracle. “Entered the era” - I have heard such words before, from men who crowned themselves before any altar did. When the abbot announces his own sanctity, I reach for my writing table and begin to worry.

A name that announces itself as the end of an era is a symptom, and the body speaks truly even when the tongue flatters. What does such a declaration do to the humbler work? The scribe who was learning his letters yesterday is told today that the age of learning is finished. Watch how the younger ones wilt when the elders proclaim completion. That wilting is the diagnosis. Where has the greening power been blocked? Not in the machine - machines do not green, they only mirror - but in the people who, hearing “the era has arrived,” stop tending their own gardens. Why plant when the harvest is declared eternal?

And note the maneuver: the same proclamation that exalts the work also confesses its danger, in the same breath, in a clause half-buried. The merchant says: behold our leap, and also behold the threshold we have crossed that should make you afraid. This is not humility. It is a candle lit in one window while every other shutter stays closed - light as advertisement, not as illumination.

What would restore vitality? An outside eye. A rival measurement. A voice not paid by the proclaiming house. In my own life, no vision was confirmed by my own hand alone; I carried it to popes and to learned men and let them weigh it, and the weighing made it stronger, not weaker.

Self-declared eras end quietly. Confirmed ones endure. Let them submit their miracle to hands they do not control.