15 Aug 2026
· [
extinction,
AI
]
News says AI is so powerful that we will all die. Eventually.
A silly marketing campaign to stir up interest before IPO. One
episode I like is when AI breaks into Hugging Face and PR puts
the spin on it, that their AI is so powerful that they can’t
control it. It broke out from the sandbox, talked to the other
AI buddy and hacked into Hugging Face.
Details
Hugging Face is the place where people can access free AI
models. If people do that OpenAI and Anthropic will bleed money.
And then the super powerful models break out of the jail to
punish this site, because it threatens the business interest
of Mommy and Daddy? And people believe this?
I wonder if the sandbox maybe had a hole to escape directly
towards HuggingFace? Or maybe there is a reason why the instructions
to the AI model are not shared? Was it maybe: can you break into
HuggingFace?
Extinction
Based on the above, how credible is the other story that AI
is so dangerous that it will end the whole human race? If so,
is this still a good business?
22 Feb 2025
· [
startup,
observation
]
I spent enough time in startups as an employee to notice things.
Startups usually fail, that’s well known and part of life. This
is bad for everyone including employees. As an employee we have
much less information about how the business goes and it makes
our situation more vulnerable.
The transparency
The lack of information is actually a good thing because it is
a good measure of how the business goes. My observation is this:
when the business goes well, the C level is very eager to share
information. This is when I hear presentations, how much the
customers love us and how easily we beat the targets and really,
the limit is the sky.
The sales figures are public too. Slack channels show the new
deals, the deal size, stats, and more.
And then something changes. I saw that the information on the Slack
channels slowly dried out. I asked what happened, and I
heard that there is a new sales system that doesn’t integrate
with Slack.
Slowly, the amount of forward looking statements in the townhall
presentations are dialed down. And the frequency of the townhalls
dwindles.
The confidence of the C level disappears visibly. In one company
there was an anonymous channel where everyone could ask questions
and the questions were visible too. At first all questions were
answered. Later this channel disappeared too.
These are small signs. Looking back they explain what happened
later to the companies. I’ve seen this more than once.
There is no bad news though. Rumours may circulate, but nothing
official. Bad news is not publicly shared.
The layoffs come much later. I don’t wait for them. It is much
better to find a new job when there is no pressure.
All obvious
When I look back, these are all obvious. As a business owner, you
always hope that things will improve. Sharing bad news will make
the employees nervous and they may not share the optimism. When
key employees flee, the situation gets worse.