co.kolwiek.co

Apr 4, 2026

There's that unbearable genre of mass-produced "a billionaire said something" articles. I see a lot of them in my social feeds or in mainstream publications. I bet these days everyone is flooded with stories like "Jensen Huan says he would be deeply alarmed if his $500.000 engineer did not consume at least $250.000 of tokens", Elon Musk claims there will be human colony on Mars by 2030, the CEO of Zoom created an AI clone of himself, Mark Zuckerberg envisions a billion people in the metaverse, to mention a few regulars of this format.

As a general rule, I avoid reading such articles; however, no matter how hard you try, the opinions covered in them often come up in lunchtime discussions at the office, since people in the tech industry tend to talk about the topics they raise. In most cases people take it quite lightly; it's just an alternative to talking about the weather, so it doesn't inspire too much despair in me. Occasionally, there will be someone deeply convinced in one of these visions, which makes you question your own sanity.

Granted, most of the time people take these claims with a huge grain of salt, but why should we even care about the newest bizarre claims that CEOs make? When Sam Altman says he cannot imagine raising children without ChatGPT, when the CEO of Microsoft describes his typical day as drafting all his decisions with Copilot, we clearly know that even the authors themselves mean absolutely nothing by stating them. Most likely they fabricated these claims, which don't seem to be thought out at all, as any line of questioning would render them either false or meaningless. The ones talking won't remember their own words tomorrow. Most importantly, it's clear that the only motive behind all these outlandish theories is creating a lot of noise about their own products. It doesn't take too much intelligence to figure out the reason why the CEO of an AI company will tell a story about how an AI assistant is in charge of his calendar, or a CEO of an autonomous cars startup saying with full confidence that "in 10 years at most we will consider driving a car as extravagant as riding a horse carriage now".

The whole thing annoys me for a few reasons. One is that people with a glaring self-interest in maintaining positive narratives about certain products are being cited as objective experts, as if they have authority based on knowledge. The other thing is that it's assumed that CEOs have some merit, that, for some reason, they're worth listening to, that they, in particular, have some interesting ideas to share. But each of these articles proves they have no clue, the things they say are cheap sensationalism, they're not well-grounded, and not even original or imaginative. These are ideas conceived by people who are easily impressed for people who are easily impressed. "What if the robots that we produce will start producing robots that would produce other robots. That would lead to asymptotic growth in the number of robots, and we would soon overpopulate Earth with robots and would need to start thinking about colonizing other planets. With the current rate of things that will happen in 5 years at most". You may hear at some TechCrunch-like event, the interviewer playing along by making theatrically, or worse, genuinely, shocked expression and you can hear some dispersed laughs and clapping in the crowd, as if something original, "thought-provoking" has been said. It means nothing, it does not make sense, it was all made up as the speaker went along. Yet, for some reason, we talk about it again and again; feeds on social media are full of it, it never stops.

When I say that they "mean nothing" by telling all these stories, I don't mean it in a rhetorical way, but in the most literal sense. It becomes apparent when you hear the same person saying opposite things depending on the convenience of the moment. "AI changes everything" when you address investors, but "don't worry, AI is yet another tool, so it doesn't change anything fundamentally" when some journalist pushes you on an unemployment question. "Engineers should use AI as much as possible" on one breath, while "you should be responsible for all generated outputs" on another. It's okay if OpenAI scrapes the entirety of the Internet, but not if DeepSeek uses other people's work. AI consumes a lot of energy? It also takes a lot of energy to train a human. AI speeds up climate catastrophe? Well, the mythical "God AI" will solve all the problems anyway, so we should speed up its development precisely in order to address the ecological collapse.

In their never-ending appetite for spinning new sci-fi narratives that would justify spending billions on their products, they know no shame. No other than Sam Altman name-dropped a Dyson sphere in a few interviews. Here is the excerpt from one of them:

I'd love to go build the Dyson sphere around the solar system and, like, you know, make the world's gigantic data center with the entire energy output of the sun. Obviously, we can't do that right now, so that one has to wait a couple of decades.

That incident was picked up by a science popularizer, Angela Collier, in her video, which brings more light into genesis of the concept of Dyson sphere. In a nutshell, a Dyson sphere is a thought experiment about how a hypothetical hyper-advanced extraterrestrial civilization in search of fully utilizing energy emitted by its star could build a megastructure capturing its entirety. Originally introduced in a science fiction novel, became known by its contemporary name after the physicist Freeman Dyson.

Before watching Angela's video, I was only vaguely familiar with the concept as something resembling science fiction, but seemingly having some backing in science, as suggested by its carrying the name of the renowned physicist. I was really surprised, then, to learn that Dyson's contribution to the topic is limited to a single paper. It's not even a physics paper in the strict sense, as it misses any math formulas or data points, it's literally a single page of hand-waving at the idea. It may look confusing at this point. The simple explanation is that Dyson wrote the article as a joke. To learn what the bottom of the joke is, watch the full video. It's hard to refute and it's widely acknowledged that the paper is a satire.

The literary style itself reveals the intention. Let me quote one of nine paragraphs of the piece:

It is remarkable that the time scale of industrial expansion, the mass of Jupiter, the energy output of the sun, and the thickness of a habitable biosphere all have consistent orders of magnitude. It seems, then, a reasonable expectation that, barring accidents, Malthusian pressures will ultimately drive an intelligent species to adopt some such efficient exploitation of its available resources. One should expect that, within a few thousand years of its entering the stage of industrial development, any intelligent species should be found occupying an artificial biosphere which completely surrounds its parent star.

It's worth noting, how closely this style resembles the self-aggrandizing style of Silicon Valley so-called thought leaders. It has everything: a mention of "orders of magnitude", vast generalizations, arbitrary numbers, and epic scales. The cherry on top is a reference to Malthus - a must-have for any self respecting eugenicist or futurist obsessed with a problem of overpopulation. All that sprinkled with a dash of back-of-the-napkin math.¹ There's something deeply satisfying in discovering Dyson predicted in 1960 what would become the Venture Capital speak at the beginning of the 21st century.

With all that in mind, we can finally appreciate the level of irony that Altman, without realizing it, was able to pull off. In the interview, we witness Altman, a bullshitter, mentioning, in all seriousness, the concept specifically created to make fun of bullshitters. It could have happened because the original humorous aspect had been lost over decades, but the profound veneer remained, thus making it an attractive topic for Elon Musks, who can't stop making bombastic, unsubstantiated claims.

Which leads me to another tangent: why CEOs love talking about physics. As it's been described fantastically by Angela in her other video it's such a weird coincidence that Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Sam Altman love to talk about physics and go as far as to say it was their dream to become physicists. To which Angela points out soberly that these are people of infinite resources, so, instead of talking so much about it, they could just go to the university. It's exactly the same thing - we are supposed to observe these super wealthy individuals and be impressed by them, insisting that they're so smart that they could alternatively only become "theoretical physicists", which in popular imagination bears some special significance. So there we end up - with these men creating some profoundly sounding word salad involving the second law of thermodynamics and conservation of energy, amounting to utter nonsense nonetheless. And their interviewer will be so amazed by the superior intellect that he will get stuck at asking "were you always a genius or did you become one at some moment", as we remember well from Musk's appearance on Joe Rogan show. Again, seemingly impressive stuff for easily impressible people. It works on people who want to be perceived as "interested in physics science nerds" because they wear T-shirts with some Richard Feynman's quote, but are too lazy to ever finish a single homework.

I think all these articles should be ignored as not worth reading, let alone discussing. It's bait, and we seem to fall for it way too often. I don't mean it in some dignified "I am above it" way. I actually believe taking a moment to have a laugh at the most bizarre claims is the only worthwhile way of interacting with them. Taking them at face value is not.

1: The prose of the satirical paper does resemble Nick Bostrom's notorious Astronomical Waste paper so much. It consists solely of sentences like this:

Advancing technology (or its enabling factors, such as economic productivity) even by such a tiny amount that it leads to colonization of the local supercluster just one second earlier than would otherwise have happened amounts to bringing about more than 10²⁹ human lives (or 10¹³ human lives if we use the most conservative lower bound) that would not otherwise have existed.

If someone calls themselves a futurist, there's a great chance writing like that is their entire job.