"Have you considered Actually Trying?" by Michaël Trazzi

There's a familiar feeling for any Super Smash Bros player: your stocks are low and your damage is high, even against a weaker opponent, so now you have to actually play to win. You can’t afford another hit. You’re going for the jugular.

In the past week, Anthropic's 2x uplift results were all over Twitter, making some people physically ill.

People with long timelines are now realizing that the uplift Anthropic employees get from AI is real, which would have some pretty wild implications for when we’d get recursive self-improvement.

People are starting to feel like it's the endgame, “the board is set”.

I do agree with everyone else that it's starting to look like we’re in the endgame.

The companies will keep on accumulating more and more power, through smarter AI models, more compute, and more talent.

But the fight is not yet over:

“We have very little time to stop full recursive self improvement

But ASI hasn't taken over yet

If we all work really hard we might still have a chance

But this means that every single person who is aware of what is going on must be *actually trying*

Like "we're [...]

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Outline:

(01:41) Actually Trying

[... 4 more sections]

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First published:
November 10th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Nts7RA9D2wTfcvk56/have-you-considered-actually-trying

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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