Skip to content
Quotes.

Nathan Lambert quote, Sep 19, 2026

Author, Interconnects · Sep 19, 2026 · Post, Why I still haven't bought into true RSI

The step from this anxiety, and incidents like OpenAI-HuggingFace, to extinction risks feels very religious.

Primary source

Words found on the source page on Sep 25, 2026.

More from Nathan Lambert

Quote
Since about April 2025, Chinese AI companies have been the clear leader in open-weight models.Sep 21, 2026· Post
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.Sep 21, 2026· Post
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.Sep 19, 2026· Post
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.Sep 19, 2026· Post
For knowledge work, which is roughly half of the U.S. economy, AI is as fundamental as electricity (or quickly will be so, with rapid improvements to agents in the next 18 months).Sep 9, 2026· Post
If given 100 years to diffuse into society, its impacts will certainly become much more obvious, like the industrial revolutions of centuries past.Sep 9, 2026· Post
Open models lack the central economic champion to represent the potential downside of action against them.Jul 12, 2026· Post
The most serious test to date of open source AI’s viability is happening right now.Jul 12, 2026· Post
The primary driver motivating regulation today is the inevitable truth that an open-weights model will soon reach the capabilities of Claude’s Mythos model.Jul 12, 2026· Post

On the same topics

Quote
The science of reading these thoughts is a subfield of AI interpretability, which is still in its infancy.Scott AlexanderSep 24, 2026· Post
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.Scott AlexanderSep 23, 2026· Post
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.Scott AlexanderSep 23, 2026· Post
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 BengioSep 23, 2026· Keynote
The companies building the most powerful AI systems admit their products pose catastrophic risks, yet offer no convincing technical solutions.Yoshua BengioSep 23, 2026· Keynote
The race is not a law of nature: it is the product of choices, choices made by the companies themselves.Yoshua BengioSep 23, 2026· Keynote
About this quote
Said by
Nathan Lambert, Author, Interconnects
Where
Why I still haven't bought into true RSI
Topics
Safety
Company
Interconnects
Source
interconnects.ai/p/where-i-stand-on-rsi

A quote is one moment, not the whole argument. Read it in context at the source.

Sources: the primary source linked on each quote, checked weekly. A quote is one moment; read the source. Logos via logo.dev; trademarks belong to their owners.

New quotes by email

Fridays, only in weeks with new on-the-record quotes from data and AI leaders.

Double opt-in. Unsubscribe any time.