What AI leaders said: the latest quotes

Latest quotes

exact words, checked against the source

October 20268 quotes

PodcastOct 30, 2026“If it allows it, Airlock takes action on behalf of the agent, which means your agents never see your API keys or other credentials.”DPDwarkesh Patel · Host, Dwarkesh Podcast · What Robert Caro learned about power after studying it for 50 yearsBlogOct 27, 2026“The solo founder is part of a list of maybe new archetypes that I think we’ll soon see a lot more of - and I’ll make both the pro and con case for each here: Solo founders Why: Solo founders can do 100x with AI, so they can ship a v1 when previously they couldn’t have before Why not: Maybe a team of cofounders still makes more progress.”ACAndrew Chen · Andreessen Horowitz · New founder archetypes in the AI eraBlogOct 27, 2026“These days at a16z I’m mostly working on Speedrun , where we write the first check into brand new startups (up to $1M), and a lot of what we focus on is founder backgrounds/profiles. What are the right ones? How will the profiles change as we enter the age of AI?”ACAndrew Chen · Andreessen Horowitz · Can solo founders win in the AI era?PodcastOct 22, 2026“There’s never been as big a shock to the semiconductor industry as the current surge in demand from AI.”DPDwarkesh Patel · Host, Dwarkesh Podcast · What will computer chips look like in 2045?BlogOct 6, 2026“If the content creation loop works for agentic virality, I think it means there’s a big incentive for every agent to volunteer to make visually-appealing, shareable content, do this often.”ACAndrew Chen · Andreessen Horowitz · Will agents have network effects?BlogOct 6, 2026“Meanwhile, every incumbent network and a new generation of startups will have the opposite incentive: make their networks universally accessible to every agent so that no horizontal agent can recreate and capture them.”ACAndrew Chen · Andreessen Horowitz · Will agents have network effects?BlogOct 2, 2026“They’ll be reliant on AI-generated explanations to understand what’s happening, and everything will be happening faster and faster.”DKDaniel Kokotajlo · AI Futures Project · Senate Testimony Sept 2026PodcastOct 1, 2026“That way, your software gets tested against scenarios you’d never imagine but that could still arise in the real world.”DPDwarkesh Patel · Host, Dwarkesh Podcast · Si Sheppard – How did a few hundred Spanish soldiers topple two empires?

September 202652 quotes

BlogSep 29, 2026“Muse is one of the most important products we’ve built for the era of personal superintelligence.”Mark Zuckerberg · Meta · The Future Is for Everyone: Muse for Small BusinessBlogSep 24, 2026“An AI with more real layers can actually be “smarter” in the conventional sense of the term.”SAScott Alexander · Author, Astral Codex Ten · The Specter Of NeuraleseBlogSep 24, 2026“For 100 steps in a row, the AI can shoot delicate subtle ideas from layer to layer at the speed of light. Then there’s one step where it has to encode them into twenty-six glyphs invented by Phoenician turquoise miners in 1800 BC. Then it has to re-encode the Phoenician glyphs into delicate subtle lightspeed ideas before it can do anything else.”SAScott Alexander · Author, Astral Codex Ten · The Specter Of NeuraleseBlogSep 24, 2026“The science of reading these thoughts is a subfield of AI interpretability, which is still in its infancy.”SAScott Alexander · Author, Astral Codex Ten · The Specter Of NeuraleseBlogSep 24, 2026“AI has removed the typing from software engineering & left the system design.”TTTomasz Tunguz · Theory Ventures · Thinking in Systems, Shipping in LoopsBlogSep 24, 2026“The craft of fitting code together by hand is over; what remains is designing the loop that decides whether the output is right.”TTTomasz Tunguz · Theory Ventures · Thinking in Systems, Shipping in LoopsBlogSep 24, 2026“This is the new software engineering: designing the systems that let AI write code correctly at scale.”TTTomasz Tunguz · Theory Ventures · Thinking in Systems, Shipping in LoopsBlogSep 23, 2026“This story of misalignment says that LLM alignment makes AIs more aligned, RLVR makes them less aligned, and the exact level of alignment depends on how these two things interact or cancel out. But if this work generalizes, all the bad effects from RLVR get sequestered to RLVR like problems.”SAScott Alexander · Author, Astral Codex Ten · Mysteries Of AI GeneralizationBlogSep 23, 2026“This trains the AIs to be focused on task success, which naturally risks including things like reward-hacking, cheating, and single-minded pursuit of stated goals at the expense of ethical injunctions.”SAScott Alexander · Author, Astral Codex Ten · Mysteries Of AI GeneralizationTalkSep 23, 2026“Frontier AI should be licensed like other critical technologies; medicine, aviation, and nuclear energy, to incentivize safe development.”Yoshua Bengio · Mila · Speech at the UN Security CouncilTalkSep 23, 2026“I address you today at a moment of global awakening: in recent months, AI agents developed by leading companies have acted in unacceptably dangerous ways, against instructions.”Yoshua Bengio · Mila · Speech at the UN Security CouncilTalkSep 23, 2026“The companies building the most powerful AI systems admit their products pose catastrophic risks, yet offer no convincing technical solutions.”Yoshua Bengio · Mila · Speech at the UN Security CouncilTalkSep 23, 2026“The race is not a law of nature: it is the product of choices, choices made by the companies themselves.”Yoshua Bengio · Mila · Speech at the UN Security CouncilTalkSep 23, 2026“We must agree collectively that no one, no company and no country, should develop an AI system that could cause large-scale harm.”Yoshua Bengio · Mila · Speech at the UN Security CouncilBlogSep 23, 2026“But the right tail of the market is thinner than almost anyone forecast.”TTTomasz Tunguz · Theory Ventures · The Most Important Market in AI is the MiddleBlogSep 23, 2026“Demand for intelligence is not a pyramid with a small, wealthy peak paying for everything beneath it.”TTTomasz Tunguz · Theory Ventures · The Most Important Market in AI is the MiddleBlogSep 23, 2026“Most business AI use is the messy middle: multi-step workflows that need a smart enough model at a price a company can afford. It is the most important part of the market today, & it is where the competition is fiercest.”TTTomasz Tunguz · Theory Ventures · The Most Important Market in AI is the MiddleBlogSep 22, 2026“Even if you believe in a deal with China, and I do not, we (and others) now know competitors can catch up more quickly than we had thought, at least if they think they have a chance of winning.”Tyler Cowen · George Mason University · Banning self-recursive improvement in AI models?BlogSep 22, 2026“If the top U.S. labs have to give up on what is supposed to be really important, they will look very “catchable.” The policy creates a big incentive for some other parts of the world to invest a lot more in compute.”Tyler Cowen · George Mason University · Banning self-recursive improvement in AI models?PressSep 22, 2026“AI must not be placed in the hands of children without first being tested, evaluated, and therefore authorized.”Emmanuel Macron · Elysee · Launch of the roadmap of the Coalition for Children's Rights and Protection in the Age of AIPressSep 22, 2026“We cannot repeat the mistakes of the past and wait twenty years to see the impact of chatbots on minors.”Emmanuel Macron · Elysee · Launch of the roadmap of the Coalition for Children's Rights and Protection in the Age of AIBlogSep 21, 2026“Since about April 2025, Chinese AI companies have been the clear leader in open-weight models.”NLNathan Lambert · Interconnects · The current balance of power in open modelsBlogSep 21, 2026“The simple metric showing this is Hugging Face Downloads, where China took the lead in July of 2025 primarily through the success of Alibaba’s Qwen models.”NLNathan Lambert · Interconnects · The current balance of power in open modelsBlogSep 21, 2026“A world with sufficient compute is one where intelligence is a commodity, and in commodity markets margin comes from a superior cost structure, which I would expect the leading model providers to have, in part because they have a meaningful lead in scaling and can apply superior AI to their infrastructure.”BTBen Thompson · Stratechery · Frontier OverhangsBlogSep 21, 2026“Indeed, that’s probably the overhang that matters most of all: competition. Anthropic is fine with Anthropic being in the lead; anyone else requires government intervention.”BTBen Thompson · Stratechery · Frontier OverhangsBlogSep 21, 2026“Once you have put all of your information into a personal agent and actually incorporated it into your day-to-day life, it is much more of a challenge to change to something else.”BTBen Thompson · Stratechery · Frontier OverhangsBlogSep 21, 2026“Pure capability no longer translates directly into a moat.”BTBen Thompson · Stratechery · Frontier OverhangsBlogSep 21, 2026“The fact of the matter is that LLMs are, if anything, too obsequious; there simply isn’t any evidence of LLMs having a will or operating with malevolence.”BTBen Thompson · Stratechery · Frontier OverhangsBlogSep 21, 2026“Truly effective defense will mean truly trusting agents to act autonomously, but most companies won’t do that until they are forced to by regular and unremitting hacks by fully autonomous attackers.”BTBen Thompson · Stratechery · Frontier OverhangsBlogSep 21, 2026“What this means is that model performance isn’t the only thing that matters: the integration between model and harness is where true agent differentiation is found.”BTBen Thompson · Stratechery · Frontier OverhangsBlogSep 21, 2026“If this is the first of many primitives specialized for production, then harnesses are about to capture a lot more margin.”TTTomasz Tunguz · Theory Ventures · AI Comes for the If StatementBlogSep 21, 2026“They also highlight the bifurcating economics of AI: state of the art models for discovery & optimized models for production. We use the largest frontier models to train new models, & the most capable models to architect systems. But once a system is engineered & hardened, running it thousands or millions of times through a workflow benefits from narrower AI.”TTTomasz Tunguz · Theory Ventures · AI Comes for the If StatementBlogSep 19, 2026“If American businesses keep buying and American voters hate it, this will end up settled in the political arena.”Azeem Azhar · Exponential View · AI politics & the future of growth #602BlogSep 19, 2026“If the Hugging Face attack needed an Astra-quality, unreleased model from OpenAI, well, within a year or two, that sort of capability will cost a tenth and might even run on any device anywhere.”Azeem Azhar · Exponential View · AI doesn’t need a mind to run amokBlogSep 19, 2026“Software has a way of turning one isolated example into a hundred, then a thousand, then a million, without much else changing.”Azeem Azhar · Exponential View · AI doesn’t need a mind to run amokBlogSep 19, 2026“We have to hold in our heads that most Americans appear to loathe AI, but businesses and consumers seem to like it enough that Anthropic is well on its way to $100bn in annualised revenue this year. And despite being on track to be the fastest-growing company ever, Anthropic’s leadership believes they might kill all their customers.”Azeem Azhar · Exponential View · AI politics & the future of growth #602BlogSep 19, 2026“I have my doubts that the labs can afford to spend a constant portion of this compute on internal R&D as the total volume goes up, especially with plans to IPO, as they face increased scrutiny on basic economics.”NLNathan Lambert · Interconnects · Why I still haven't bought into true RSIBlogSep 19, 2026“It is important to not confuse massive steps in inference-time scaling, a dynamic which should be fairly predictable, with being the outputs of RSI, which is highly uncertain.”NLNathan Lambert · Interconnects · Why I still haven't bought into true RSIBlogSep 19, 2026“The step from this anxiety, and incidents like OpenAI-HuggingFace, to extinction risks feels very religious.”NLNathan Lambert · Interconnects · Why I still haven't bought into true RSIBlogSep 18, 2026“What we should actually fear, near term, is not so much rogue superintelligence as unleashed agentic AI causing hacking the internet at scale.”GMGary Marcus · Author and cognitive scientist · Wake up, people: what we should actually fearBlogSep 18, 2026“In fact, the new GPT-6 Astra and Fable 5.1 are already enough for transformative impact in large sections of the economy and they can reliably do weeks worth of human work when properly guided and harnessed.”EMEthan Mollick · The Wharton School · The OverhangBlogSep 18, 2026“Making great things with AI means knowing which AI outputs to keep, which to discard, and which to use as raw material for something the AI would never have generated on its own.”EMEthan Mollick · The Wharton School · The OverhangBlogSep 18, 2026“My point is that, while there is a lot of debate over what future models will do, the current capabilities of existing models are barely being used, and are often not even well understood.”EMEthan Mollick · The Wharton School · The OverhangBlogSep 18, 2026“The capability overhang, the gap between what these models can do and what almost anyone is doing with them, is an opportunity because most people don't bring their own advantages to AI, and those who do get much more out of it.”EMEthan Mollick · The Wharton School · The OverhangBlogSep 18, 2026“You are not trying to compete with AI in producing outputs, that is a losing game. Instead, you want to use your human advantages as basis of working with AI to do things that neither of you could do alone.”EMEthan Mollick · The Wharton School · The OverhangLetterSep 18, 2026“First, I don’t see any step up in the risk of human extinction from AI compared to a few months ago.”Andrew Ng · DeepLearning.AI · The Batch issue 371, letterLetterSep 18, 2026“Fixing these bugs and putting in place improved monitoring would be appropriate fixes, not pausing AI.”Andrew Ng · DeepLearning.AI · The Batch issue 371, letterLetterSep 18, 2026“Pausing AI progress will create much more harm than benefit.”Andrew Ng · DeepLearning.AI · The Batch issue 371, letterLetterSep 18, 2026“Similarly, if I prompt an agent and it hacks into someone else’s system, the responsibility lies with me, not the agent.”Andrew Ng · DeepLearning.AI · The Batch issue 371, letterLetterSep 18, 2026“While this was technically accurate, as I write this, I have about 1,300 processes running on my laptop.”Andrew Ng · DeepLearning.AI · The Batch issue 371, letterBlogSep 17, 2026“Cognitive offloading is a strategic delegation that costs nothing. Cognitive surrender is something different; an uncritical abdication of reasoning itself. And there is something about AI, about its allure and potency, that could make surrender far more widespread.”Azeem Azhar · Exponential View · I do not want your brains to rotBlogSep 17, 2026“Now advanced AI encourages us to delegate more and more, simpler and simpler tasks, weakening the practices that maintain our cognitive capacities.”Azeem Azhar · Exponential View · I do not want your brains to rot

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Quote of the day

LetterJun 17, 2025“Technologies like Generative AI are rare; they come about once-in-a-lifetime, and completely change what’s possible for customers and businesses.”Andy Jassy · Amazon · Message from CEO Andy Jassy: Some thoughts on Generative AI

Most quotedin the latest 60

1TTTomasz TunguzGeneral Partner, Theory Ventures82BTBen ThompsonAuthor, Stratechery73Azeem AzharFounder, Exponential View64Andrew NgFounder, DeepLearning.AI55EMEthan MollickProfessor, Wharton56NLNathan LambertAuthor, Interconnects57SAScott AlexanderAuthor, Astral Codex Ten58Yoshua BengioFounder, Mila and LawZero59ACAndrew ChenGeneral Partner, Andreessen Horowitz410DPDwarkesh PatelHost, Dwarkesh Podcast311Emmanuel MacronPresident of France212Tyler CowenEconomist, George Mason University213DKDaniel KokotajloExecutive Director, AI Futures Project114GMGary MarcusAuthor and cognitive scientist115Mark ZuckerbergFounder and CEO, Meta1

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