The Lab Vibepocalypse

Allow me to start with something trite: the history of technology and progress and economic growth is the history of the exponential. Wow, very insightful, should we throw a summit? Should we invite Ray Kurzweil?

The thing about exponentials, of course, is that they start out looking kind of slow. Sometimes they even feel slow while you’re on them. During the 2010s, technology was just about the only sector of the global economy with any juice, but it didn’t feel fast. There is a reason Peter Thiel made much hay with the line, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”

If you’re reading this newsletter, you’re probably well across the idea that the capabilities of AI models have been progressing very fast indeed. You’ve probably seen a tweet that said “GPT-4 was AGI”. But even you have to admit—that first bit did feel a little flat, didn’t it? How many R’s are there in “strawberry”, anyway?

Not anymore, folks. We’re on the vertical line now. And the whiplash that everyone acquired from “can’t do basic math” to “progress on Riemann” has started to set in.

I’ll tell you one thing—there sure are a lot of people leaving the frontier labs right as things get interesting. What’s that about?

Cristina Criddle@CristinaCriddle

SCOOP: OpenAI's ethics lead has left the company after less than a year in post. Chloé Bakalar is the latest in a number of departures last month, as the company faces scrutiny over safety of its model development

ft.com

OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves start-up less than one year after joining

10:39 PM · Aug 10, 2026 · 932 Views

1 Reply · 2 Reposts · 10 Likes

OpenAI has seen a string of departures, including notably their ethics lead. Former COO and current special projects guy (very cool title) Brad Lightcap announced yesterday that he was leaving after eight years. Barret Zoph came back and then left again. Joshua Achiam left recently. Afrur Grok, a pseudonymous X account with an incredible insider track on the labs, posted that Justin Boyle left OpenAI. I don’t know who Justin Boyle is, and when I looked him up, the only place I could find that name attached to OpenAI was on the staff letter to the board announcing their intention to leave for Microsoft after Sam was ousted. Ominous.

Brad Lightcap@bradlightcap

i shared the message below with the openai team this morning. these decisions are never easy, but the talent and mission orientation of the openai team make me more optimistic than ever. 🤍 ### Team, it is bittersweet to share that I’ll be moving on from OpenAI to start

4:16 PM · Aug 11, 2026 · 1.69M Views

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Then there are the Google Deepmind departures and restructure. Noam Shazeer left in June. Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat were so central to Google lore that the New Yorker ran a joint profile of the pair in 2018. Dean specifically is the subject of one of those millennial-type joke formats attributing to him unlikely, impossible or superhuman feats. If you read the New Yorker profile, you will see that it documents several of these feats as both true and central to the success of Google. Demis Hassabis was literally the lead AI programmer for the 2001 God Simulation game, Black and White.

Demis Hassabis@demishassabis

I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life, and as we enter this pivotal moment, I’m stepping into a new role as Chair of Google DeepMind & Chief Scientist of Alphabet. This will allow me to focus on long-term strategy, and accelerating scientific breakthroughs, including

4:04 PM · Aug 5, 2026 · 1.97M Views

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Where are all these people going? Demis is getting a new title, but the implication is that he’s going to be less involved with the day-to-day of Deepmind. X speculation is that the departures are a response to a broader strategic realignment at Google away from research. You’re doing less research? Research? The thing that led to the creation of AGI?

Dan Schwarz@dschwarz26

I since talked to a lot of people, including some long-time Googlers. Nobody had a simple explanation, so I did some nowcasting to try to figure out what led to Jeff and Demis stepping down. We'll probably never know the drama/politics, but my sense is that the common factor is

Dan Schwarz @dschwarz26

I worked at Google from 2014-2022, and the last thing I did before leaving was forecast AI outcomes there. So I found today's news pretty interesting, especially as I'm reading the Demis Hassabis book right now. (Everyone seems to have a good Jeff Dean story, mine is that I

11:46 PM · Aug 6, 2026 · 69.2K Views

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Some, of course, are starting new companies. Dean and Ghemawat have started Discovery Loop to build RSI. Brad Lightcap is doing something new. These are extremely capable people with long track records of success, and I expect their new ventures will reflect this. But I also can’t help thinking that these decisions—by people deeply familiar with the state of the technology and the progress being made at their former employers—suggest a degree of skepticism. To paraphrase the classic typedfemale tweet: RSI may have implications for new entrants. The corollary may suggest something about Google’s distance from the frontier.

typedfemale@typedfemale

sam altman: we are a few 1000 days away from building god. we will build suns on earth, unify physics and resurrect the worthy dead garry tan: sounds like this will be really impactful for startups sam altman: definitely. no better time to be a startup

3:58 AM · Nov 9, 2024 · 511K Views

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Lest you think I’m verging on the tabloid: people leave! Happy people leave great companies. And guessing the internal state of a company from the outside is always a difficult task. Morale ebbs and flows. It’s a little easier to get a read on the public perception of AI companies, however. And there are some problems there too.

Fernando Borretti@zetalyrae

In English this is called a "trvke" which is short for "truth nuclear bomb".

12:16 AM · Aug 11, 2026 · 42.2K Views

8 Replies · 7 Reposts · 290 Likes

Certain recent events have brought renewed attention to the risks posed by highly capable AI models—risks that, it must be said, the leadership of frontier AI labs has been unusually candid about for a very long time. Initially much of this attention came from insiders and cybersecurity experts, but there are now growing signs that the Hugging Face incident is going to be the event that kicks off a more public reckoning.

Andrew Curran@AndrewCurran_

Okay, this is the letter from the CNBC story, they actually wrote three. One to Speaker Johnson (this one), one to Dario Amodei (above) and one to Sam Altman (I will post that next)

11:26 PM · Aug 11, 2026 · 693 Views

1 Reply · 1 Repost · 4 Likes

Nothing plays better than a clip of a powerful CEO getting righteously grilled by Congress, for example. A group of House Democrats yesterday sent three letters—one to Speaker Johnson and one each to Sam Altman and Dario Amodei—calling for a Congressional inquiry into AI safety and asking that both Altman and Amodei be called to testify under oath.

Shakeel@ShakeelHashim

Emil Michael RTing an article claiming OpenAI’s relationship with the government is damaged because the admin doesn’t like Dean Ball???

1:29 PM · Aug 10, 2026 · 61.9K Views

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At the same time, a Business Insider profile of new OpenAI Head of Strategic Futures and MTS friend of the show Dean Ball apparently prompted a New York Post response. The Ball hit job then got reposted by Under Secretary of War Emil Michael. If this is all getting a little inside baseball for you, it’s worth highlighting that Dean is not a natural enemy of the admin. He was, in fact, a member of the admin, where he was either the principal author of the AI Action Plan, or, if you read the New York Post, an errant poltergeist haunting the first-floor break-room vending machine.

Even Anthropic copped a stray this week—Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, relayed his impressions from a visit to the Anthropic book club to the Information:

The first thing that struck me most of all was what always strikes me with new technologies: the moral panic side. The general sense that this is going to destroy the world. It’s come up every time,” he told me. He went back in history. When 17th century Brits started using coal as fuel for the first time, preachers called it the “devil’s excrement,” he recalled. The rise of the automobile, last century, also stirred protests, he said.

Any one of these thins—major safety incidents, heightened scrutiny, staff departures, tabloid hit pieces, an abiding sense of existential doom—would be a buzzkill on its own. Collectively, they have made for a difficult few weeks in the labs. Reach out to your local Member of the Technical Staff. Ask if there’s anything you can do for them for a change. I’m sure a home-cooked meal and a batch of chocolate chip cookies would be welcome on the exponential.

There is a trope developing with my MTS newsletters where every piece ends with the observation that, whatever I have just talked about, it’s going to keep accelerating. Better models, more capabilities, cooler robots, crazier cyberattacks, higher benchmarks, more compute. You better hold on.

Well, in keeping with this trend, it seems to me that AI companies are also speedrunning the reputational arc of the tech companies that preceded them. There was a period—many remember it as a golden age—when the default attitude of the public and the media towards new technology was a kind of optimistic curiosity. Whoa, the geeks made a cell phone with a touchscreen? Radical. Don’t Be Evil? Gnarly, man.

Kelsey Piper@KelseyTuoc

People might think Matt is overstating this but I literally heard it from NYT reporters at the time. There was a top-down decision that tech could not be covered positively, even when there was a true, newsworthy and positive story. I'd never heard anything like it. https://t.co/dPwtQirBc4

6:09 PM · Nov 3, 2022

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Over time, these companies ceased to be the scrappy newcomers in the public imagination and took on a more sinister aspect. The press, which had been prepared to share their quirky new products and smile, wide-eyed, while a Stanford dropout pitched them the future, started to ask harder questions. Ultimately this verged into some ugly and unfair territory.

This transformation took place over the course of a decade and still created, I think, a sense of whiplash among many in tech. OpenAI and Anthropic have never received the kind of positive, uncritical coverage that earlier tech companies managed. But they are about to watch their public profile go from nothing to “one of the most powerful and important companies on earth, worthy of the highest scrutiny” in the space of six months. The vibes are going to be very interesting indeed.