Why I still haven’t bought into true RSI

We’re in an era where a few organizations are using thousands of concurrent agents to improve their processes and output. These organizations happen to be just the frontier AI labs, in particular OpenAI and Anthropic. In the last few weeks, I’ve been pondering what it means for so many employees across these organizations to rapidly update their expectations for the pace of AI progress and associated risks. A core perspective I have is that the frontier labs and broader frenetic, competitive culture in the San Francisco AI scene set up an environment that amplifies any AI concern. This has some benefits in causing more general audience awareness of AI, as fear sells, but exaggerating risk timelines or severity will have negative second-order effects. I remember many loud AI safety debates, and their associated clouds over the viability of open-source AI, in 2023 and 2024 — the primary risks then did not arrive in the forecasted timelines. The general populace of these two key labs was very anxious about AI risks and the rate of progress even a year ago, and especially as agents got stronger product-market fit at the start of 2026. This cultural precondition, when exposed to the reality…