Sam Altman @sama · 7h
Replying to @sama
The world has extremely capable models now; I did not expect a result of this magnitude to happen so soon.
We have been talking a lot about the need to pace progress to ensure safety; for me this is the strongest evidence yet of the urgency.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Reply in a thread by Sam Altman saying the world has extremely capable models now, that a result of this magnitude came sooner than he expected, and that it is the strongest evidence yet for the need to pace progress to ensure safety. The result it refers to is not visible in this capture.
Alex Tabarrok reposted
Sam Altman ✓ [OpenAI logo icon] @sama · 5h
[Screenshot of a codex/coding-agent UI, project folder "argon" selected:]
What should we work on in argon?
start training GPT-6, you can have the whole cluster. extra goblins.
[UI controls: Default permissions, model selector "5.5 Extra High", Send button]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) himself joining the "goblins" meme that circulated widely this day, jokingly typing "start training GPT-6, you can have the whole cluster. extra goblins" into what looks like an internal Codex-style coding-agent UI referencing a project codenamed "argon." Notable for capping off the meme thread with the CEO's own participation, and for the incidental glimpse of an internal OpenAI tool UI and codename ("argon") plus a model label "5.5 Extra High" (reasoning-effort tier).
Sam Altman @sama · 18h
build monuments in the desert
1.4K 1.1K 12K 1.1M
Arthur B. @ArthurB · 18h (in reply)
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
7 3 63 16K
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Dark-mode X/Twitter screenshot: Sam Altman's tweet 'build monuments in the desert' followed by a reply from Arthur B. quoting the closing lines of Shelley's 'Ozymandias' verbatim.
Sam Altman ✓ [ChatGPT/OpenAI badge]
@sama
I remembered a lot of this, but here is a part I had forgotten:
"Elon said he wanted to accumulate $80B for a self-sustaining city on Mars, and that he needed and deserved majority equity. He said that he needed full control since he'd been burned by not having it in the past, and when we discussed succession he surprised us by talking about his children controlling AGI."
I appreciate people saying what they want and think it enables people to resolve things (or not). But Elon saying he wants the above is important context for Greg trying to figure out what he wants.
1:20 PM · Jan 16, 2026 · 995.1K Views
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Sam Altman tweet recounting a past conversation in which Elon Musk reportedly wanted majority equity/control in OpenAI and discussed his children controlling AGI, offered as context in an ongoing dispute involving Greg Brockman. Relevant to Nathan's tracking of AI-lab governance and power-concentration dynamics around frontier AI development.
Sam Altman @sama · 3m
soon we will need another exam...
[Quoted:] Dan Hendr... @DanHendr... · 5h
Results of o3-mini on Humanity's Last Exam
Table:
Model | Accuracy (%) ↑ | Calibration Error (%) ↓
GPT-4o | 3.3 | 92.5
Grok-2 | 3.8 | 93.2
Claude 3.5 Sonnet | 4.3 | 88.9
Gemini Thinking | 7.7 | 91.2
o1 | 9.1 | 93.4
DeepSeek-R1* | 9.4 | 81.8
o3-mini (medium)* | 10.5 | 92.0
o3-mini (high)* | 13.0 | 93.2
*Model is not multi-modal, evaluated on text-only subset.
99 replies, 33 reposts, 351 likes, 17K views
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Benchmark table from Dan Hendrycks showing model performance on "Humanity's Last Exam," reposted by Sam Altman noting rapid saturation of eval benchmarks. Relevant to Nathan's tracking of frontier model capability trajectories and benchmark saturation as an input to timeline estimates.
Sam Altman ✓ @sama · 18h
build monuments in the desert
[1.4K replies, 1.1K reposts, 12K likes, 1.1M views]
Arthur B. 🌮 ✓ @ArthurB · 18h
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
[7 replies, 3 reposts, 63 likes, 16K views]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Sam Altman's cryptic "build monuments in the desert" tweet (in the context of the Stargate Project data-center announcement) followed by Arthur B.'s reply quoting the final lines of Shelley's "Ozymandias" — a pointed literary jab about hubris and the impermanence of monumental projects, aimed at the AI infrastructure buildout.
