The Real Mr. Boddy

I think something is fundamentally broken inside the AI labs. Let me explain why. Look at the builders. Elon in 2008, Tesla and SpaceX both weeks from death, putting his last dollars on the table. Jensen running Nvidia for years under the motto "we're 30 days from going out of business." Travis, kicked out of the company he built with his own hands. Building a company is a machine for humility. Reality hits you every single day. Customers don't care about your vision. Payroll doesn't care about your ego. The market punishes you the moment you start believing your own story. That's why real founders, whatever you think of them, end up grounded. They've been humiliated by reality enough times to know they can be wrong. Dario's story started well. He left OpenAI at the end of 2020, with a group of researchers, because he didn't like how things were being run there. And on Sam, history proved him right: a board that fired him for not being "consistently candid," the war with Elon over turning a nonprofit into a profit machine, the Scarlett Johansson voice episode. Dario looked at all that and said: not like this. I genuinely believe he was sincere at the start. But I think he got corrupted by two things. The first is hubris. Five years from founding to one of the biggest IPOs in history. When the world validates everything you say that fast, you stop hearing the word no. You never get the humbling years Jensen and Elon got. The second is a deeply collectivist vision of how humanity should be managed. The idea that AI is too dangerous for the many, so a small enlightened group must decide for everyone: who gets chips, which countries, which companies, which models. Jensen summed it up better than anyone: "He thinks AI is so scary, but only they should do it." That's not safety. That's central planning with a moral halo. Now look at the last two weeks. Jensen goes down in a personal scandal. His private life is his business and his board made its call. But look at who was pushing. Anthropic put $40M into a political group that funded super PACs backing lawmakers who then co-signed the letter demanding Jensen explain himself. The man who stood in the way of chip export bans, the man Trump personally called to tell him to fight for his job, is gone. Days before Anthropic's IPO. And Nvidia is one of Anthropic's investors, which makes the whole thing even stranger. I'm not saying Dario orchestrated it. Nobody has proven that. But Anthropic and this administration have been at war over AI policy for a long time, and Jensen was the industry's bridge to this White House. When the lab that preaches humility funds the political machine that ends up taking down its biggest ideological opponent, you're allowed to ask questions. That's the core problem. People who've never been humbled by reality, convinced they're saving humanity, holding the most powerful technology ever built. That's the most dangerous kind of power: the kind that thinks it's virtuous. Builders build. They don't take down other builders.