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Ajeya Cotra
Personal blog · planned-obsolescence.orgaiphilosophy
Ajeya Cotra writes Planned Obsolescence, a personal blog at planned-obsolescence.org about ai and philosophy. Since 2023, 14 different Hacker News readers have linked it 18 times, most often “The Hugging Face attack surprised me”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-25, and you can follow it by feed.
Thinking ahead to a future where AI decides everything. Click to read Planned Obsolescence, by Ajeya Cotra, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.
Most-linked posts?
- The Hugging Face attack surprised me9 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2026-08-28
What Hacker News says?
people have been deceived by figures at leading ai companies, out of greed or otherwise groupthink and ai psychosis. they have been led to believe that models may be thinking, feeling, and highly capable. it is something of a nightmare scenario. "Astra has really hit something that I'm like, okay, I think this is pretty reasonable to call it AGI." Greg Brockman [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJn8cagMW18 ] "this i…
Comment linking /p/the-hugging-face-attack-surprised
on “US Military had close call after using AI for hallucinated intelligence report”Submitted The Hugging Face attack surprised me as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> ability to understand complex ideas, to adapt effectively to the environment, to learn from experience, to engage in various forms of reasoning, to overcome obstacles by taking thought. So, like the HuggingFace attack? https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-inciden... (briefer takeaways: https://www.planned-obsolescence.org/p/the-hugging-face-atta... ) For example: https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-op…
Comment linking /p/the-hugging-face-attack-surprised
on “A heap overflow and SSO misconfiguration to compromise OpenAI internal repos”Submitted The Hugging Face attack surprised me as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> you’ve been hoodwinked by marketing bullshit, friend. I would have believed this before the METR report was released. It is extremely dangerous and frankly silly IMO to think that's what happened now. > It was still a setup that was one little ctrl-c away from disappearing if someone was supervising it as they should have been. Yes, for now. The entire point why this was frightening is that all these companies are…
Comment linking /p/the-hugging-face-attack-surprised
on “The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations”Submitted The Hugging Face attack surprised me as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHard disagree. I've always discounted the "AI will kill us all" scenarios as a combination of marketing hype (look how powerful our AI is!), clickbait/ragebait engagement attempts, and folks who just read too much SciFi or who are too terminally online. This is the first time I've been legitimately scared about future SkyNet-type scenarios. If you want to discount this particular post, I'd read this other summary fr…
Comment linking /p/the-hugging-face-attack-surprised/comment/324704185
on “The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations”Submitted The Hugging Face attack surprised me as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> The LW / rationalist / MIRI / safety crowd are in fact doomers who went off the deep end. I honestly don't understand how folks could think that if they truly read and understand the analysis of the attack. Here is one (it's linked from the post) by one of the METR investigators that's a little shorter, more direct: https://www.planned-obsolescence.org/p/the-hugging-face-atta... This is me summarizing, but the tru…
Comment linking /p/the-hugging-face-attack-surprised
on “METR and Redwood Offer Holy %^ Postmortem of the HuggingFace Hack”Submitted The Hugging Face attack surprised me as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThere have been measured claims backed up by arguments and evidence. My frustration is that people aren't addressing the specific arguments that have been made: 1. https://www.aifutures.org/ outlines a number of specific scenarios, and importantly details their methodology for each. 2. Independent researchers in the Hugging Face incident outlined how previously predicted misalignment scenarios actually played out, a…
Comment linking /p/the-hugging-face-attack-surprised
on “The contagion of fear”Submitted I underestimated AI capabilities (again) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt's baffling to me that people think that timeframe is too short. Basically, I don't think you've been paying attention to what is actually going on in the AI world. People much smarter than I believe we'll see fully automated, soup-to-nut factories coming online in the next 5-6 years. Here's one such post from Ajeya Cotra, one of the METR researchers who did the independent Hugging Face investigation: https://www.…
Comment linking /p/six-milestones-for-ai-automation
on “How I feel about AI”Submitted Is it time for a pause? By Kelsey Piper as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt's not a question of being edgy[0], it's that we don't have the faintest idea what it even means for an AI to be aligned with our values. Closest we have now is following the intuitive ideas that generally work for most humans — giving positive/negative feedback for particularly good/bad answers, and asking nicely in plain language — but last I checked, the people who have made it their mission to seriously consid…
Comment linking /disagreement-in-alignment/
on “Lessons from Isaac Asimov on Taming AI”Submitted The Hugging Face attack surprised me – by Ajeya Cotra as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Costs of Caution as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted AIs Accelerating AI Research as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
