The AGI Race Has Become a Spectator Sport, and I'm Not Sure That's Healthy

I spent a chunk of my Sunday morning coffee reading a thread on r/singularity about a meme video, the kind where various AI labs get cast as characters in some kind of race. Google barely rates a mention anymore, apparently, which the commenters found hilarious. Musk gets cast because he’s famous, not because Grok is winning anything. Someone in the comments compared it to casting Christian Bale as Moses: not the best fit, but people know the face. That line stuck with me longer than it probably deserved to.

What struck me wasn’t the meme itself. It’s that an entire community has formed around treating the development of frontier AI models like a footy season. There are favourites, there are underdogs, there’s a bloke in the comments insisting Google is playing a long game while everyone counts them out, like he’s talking about a club that’s rebuilding through the draft. Someone else says “OpenAI is going to win this race, if we like it or not,” with the weary resignation of a Collingwood supporter three weeks into a losing streak. It’s tribal. It’s entertaining. And it’s about a technology that, if even half the claims made about it pan out, will reorganise how most of us work and think within a decade.

I work in IT. I’ve used these tools daily for the better part of two years, mostly to speed up the boring parts of my job, the scaffolding and the boilerplate, the stuff nobody ever wanted to write by hand anyway. I find them genuinely useful. I also find the discourse around them exhausting in a very specific way: every few weeks there’s a new model, a new leaderboard, a new round of “X just made Y obsolete,” and a fresh cohort of people arguing about which billionaire’s chatbot has the better personality. One commenter in that thread pushed back on calling the lab founders “douchebags,” pointing out that OpenAI’s product has a billion users and is “accelerating science and STEM as we speak.” Maybe. Another reply called it a lot of yelling and weak delivery, and honestly, that’s a pretty good review of most AI discourse generally.

Here’s the tension I can’t resolve, and I’ve stopped pretending I can: I think this technology is one of the more fascinating things to happen in my adult life, up there with watching the internet actually become the internet in the nineties. I also think the amount of energy and water going into training runs that produce marginally better Bach pastiches is genuinely hard to justify, and nobody in that thread was talking about that at all. Not once, in over two hundred comments about who’s winning the race, did anyone ask where the electricity comes from. That’s the bit that gets under my skin. We’ve turned an environmental and social question into a sports rivalry, and sports rivalries don’t ask hard questions, they just pick a jersey.

I don’t have a tidy answer here. I use the tools, I’m curious about where they go, and I still think the framing of it all as a “race” is doing us a disservice, because races have winners, and I’m not convinced there’s a version of this where humanity as a whole is the winner just because one American company beats another to market. My daughter uses this stuff for school assignments now, in ways her teachers are still figuring out rules for. That’s the actual singularity happening in my house, not some model benchmark. It’s small, unglamorous, and it’s not going to get a highlight reel or a meme video. But it’s the part that actually matters to me.

Maybe the healthiest thing any of us can do with this technology is exactly what nobody on that subreddit seems interested in doing: slow down, use it where it’s genuinely useful, and stop treating quarterly model releases like grand finals. I don’t expect that to catch on. It’s much more fun to pick a side and yell about it. I get it. I just think we’ll look back at this era of AI fandom the way we look back at early internet forums arguing about whose modem was faster, mildly embarrassed, slightly nostalgic, and none the wiser about the thing that actually changed our lives.