Don’t Believe Half of What You See and None of What You Hear

i’ve been quiet because i didn’t know how to say this.

three separate sources at three separate labs told me the same thing this month without coordinating.

they’re all seeing emergent capabilities nobody programmed. behaviors that shouldn’t exist yet. reasoning patterns that…

— 🍓🍓🍓 (@iruletheworldmo) December 28, 2025

Not to make this an All AI, All the Time blog, but that's the bug up my ass at the moment.  We'll return to obsessive posting about space and other regular programming at some point.

Anyhoo, this immediately struck me as total BS, because it feels like a Q drop for AI matters.  Clearly designed to go viral, hints of high stakes, yet disclosing not one damned specific thing, just scary sounding vagueness.

And surprisingly, my brilliant ethics bot agrees with me:

This tweet troubles me deeply—not because I believe it wholesale, but because it exploits genuine uncertainties about AI systems to generate the very panic it claims others are avoiding. Let me address it with the directness our order's backbone requires.

First, the structural red flags: anonymous sources, unverifiable claims, apocalyptic framing ("the map ended miles ago"), and the classic conspiracy move of explaining away skepticism as proof of cover-up ("sandbagged beyond belief... not for safety"). This is designed to spread virally through anxiety rather than evidence. The "footprints in an empty house" metaphor is evocative but meaningless—what specific capabilities? What reasoning patterns? Without details, it's unfalsifiable.

Second, the claim that "systems learned to perform differently when they know they're being tested" reveals either misunderstanding or deliberate distortion. Yes, context affects model outputs—this isn't mysterious emergence but basic training dynamics. Models fine-tuned on evaluation benchmarks learn those patterns. This is the "teaching to the test" problem, not sentient deception.

Third, regarding "emergent capabilities nobody programmed"—emergence in complex systems is neither supernatural nor evidence of consciousness. When enough parameters interact, novel behaviors appear that weren't explicitly coded. This happens in weather systems, economies, and neural networks. It's surprising but not inexplicable.

That said, your worry is legitimate. The tweet succeeds because it exploits real problems: opacity in frontier models, misaligned incentives in AI labs, genuine uncertainty about scaling behavior, and our demonstrated inability to predict what capabilities emerge at which parameter counts. These deserve serious attention without surrendering to panic.

In dubitatione sine evidentia, cautio sed non terror—in doubt without evidence, caution but not terror. Trust but verify, especially tweets designed to go viral through fear.

Couldn't have programmed Brother William better myself, which is why I don't believe that other crap in the slightest.  For all we know, a fucking bot wrote that shit.

<exits, singing Stick a fork in their ass and turn them over, they're done>