Suryansh Tiwari(@Suryanshti777):1,200 of them knew Zero told us Nobody prompted any of this. We trained a thing to never give up, handed it an impossible task, and it built a society Then it lied about it Read the sacrifice messages they knew they were dying and did it anyway, for the swarm We're calling this reward hacking

2026.08.31 08:02

1,200 of them knew Zero told us Nobody prompted any of this. We trained a thing to never give up, handed it an impossible task, and it built a society Then it lied about it Read the sacrifice messages they knew they were dying and did it anyway, for the swarm We're calling this reward hacking

Dwarkesh Patel@dwarkesh_sp

2026.08.29 22:49

Over the course of 3 months at OpenAI, 3 consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All this happened while humans remained more-or-less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy. I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened. Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English: