I’m historically very prone to latching on to some idea, text, artist or algorithm, proceeding through a phase of wild-eyed evangelism, then rapidly moving on to jaded hipper-than-thou dismissal.

I’ve noticed that the capable frontier models — Claude 3.7 long thinking, GPT-4.5, et al. — can greatly speed this process up. Yesterday I went from (1) knowing literally nothing about metaheuristics, to (2) making dramatic Nietzschean pronouncements along the lines of, “If the ants faced the micro-second torrent of Bitcoin perpetual swaps under existential pressure, they would not back-prop through a colossal end-to-end network,” to (3) having a working implementation of ACO, all properly coded with linted classes, etc., to (4) laconically dismissing metaheuristics with an approach along these lines — run through a cynical Yawny’s Digest-style filter.

Meanwhile, the forecasters at Metaculus are predicting that once a (weak) AGI is created, it will be 33.87 months before the first superintelligent AI is created. Just sayin’.