The ticker

Along the top of the screen runs a rotating crawl of 123 quotes. Every one is real. Every one is attributed to a named person or a named institution, with the venue, the date, and a link to the source. Nothing has been invented, compressed misleadingly, or attributed to someone who did not say it. That rule is not negotiable, because the joke does not work if they are fake — and it works extremely well when they are not.

They are sorted by absurdity. Here is a fraction of what is in there.

On when, exactly, AGI arrives

"I think we'll be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90 percent of the code. And then in twelve months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code." — Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, Council on Foreign Relations, March 2025

"If you define AGI as smarter than the smartest human, I think it's probably next year, within two years." — Elon Musk, April 2024

"AI will probably be smarter than any single human next year. By 2029, AI is probably smarter than all humans combined." — Elon Musk, on X, 2024. The "next year" in question was 2025.

"It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!)" — Sam Altman, The Intelligence Age, September 2024

"AGI by 2027 is strikingly plausible." — Leopold Aschenbrenner, former OpenAI researcher, Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead, 2024

"In my opinion, we have already achieved AGI and it's even more clear with O1. We have not achieved 'better than any human at any task,' but what we have is 'better than most humans at most tasks.'" — Vahid Kazemi, member of technical staff at OpenAI, on X — declaring AGI achieved by redefining it

"AGI has been achieved internally." — Sam Altman, on Reddit, his first comment there in seven years. He later edited in a note explaining that he was joking.

On your job

"There will be no programmers in five years." — Emad Mostaque, then CEO of Stability AI, July 2023

"People should stop training radiologists now. It's just completely obvious that within five years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists." — Geoffrey Hinton, Nobel laureate, 2016. Radiology residency applications subsequently hit record highs; the United States has a radiologist shortage.

"So white collar work where you're sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person, most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months." — Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, Financial Times

"It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program. And that the programming language is human." — Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, World Governments Summit, February 2024 — advising against learning to code

"Everybody in the world is now a programmer. This is the miracle of artificial intelligence." — Jensen Huang, same event, same day

"To me, AI is capable of doing all our jobs, my own included." — Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Klarna, on X. Klarna later rehired human support staff.

"Our brand is built on 'Stop Hiring Humans.' But we need more engineers on the team…" — Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, CEO of Artisan, on LinkedIn

"Some creative jobs maybe will go away. But maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place." — Mira Murati, then CTO of OpenAI, at Dartmouth

On money

"Generative AI will require $900 trillion in cumulative capital expenditure on data centres and chips." — Masayoshi Son, CEO of SoftBank, Riyadh, October 2024 — arguing that Nvidia was undervalued. World GDP is on the order of $110 trillion.

"Sam Altman is reported to be seeking between $5 trillion and $7 trillion to rebuild the global semiconductor industry." — The Wall Street Journal, February 2024

"We expect to end this year above $20 billion in annualized revenue run rate… We are looking at commitments of about $1.4 trillion over the next 8 years." — Sam Altman, 2025

"Hypothetically, if Tesla was making one billion of these a year… maybe on the order of $30,000, I'm just guessing here, that's $30 trillion in revenue." — Elon Musk, on Optimus robots, July 2025. Thirty trillion dollars is about a quarter of world GDP.

"I sincerely believe there is no bubble in the AI space. Hundreds of billions of dollars is needed to build this out." — Larry Fink, Chairman and CEO of BlackRock, Davos

"Two trillion dollars in annual revenue is what's needed to fund computing power needed to meet anticipated AI demand by 2030. However, even with AI-related savings, the world is still $800 billion short." — Bain & Company, Global Technology Report, September 2025

On the power bill

"Many people project demand for our industry will go from 3 percent to 99 percent of total generation." — Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, testifying to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, April 2025

"What we need from you is we need the energy in all forms, renewable, non-renewable, whatever. It needs to be there, and it needs to be there quickly." — Eric Schmidt, same testimony

"You need more electricity than any human being has ever in the history of the world." — Donald Trump, "Winning the AI Race" summit, Washington DC, July 2025

"We're going to start building these giant gigawatt data centers in space." — Jeff Bezos, Italian Tech Week, Turin, October 2025

"We're calling the first one Prometheus and it's coming online in '26. We're also building Hyperion, which will be able to scale up to 5 GW over several years. Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan." — Mark Zuckerberg, on Threads

On death, disease and the human condition

"AI-enabled biology and medicine will allow us to compress the progress that human biologists would have achieved over the next 50–100 years into 5–10 years." — Dario Amodei, Machines of Loving Grace

"Reductions of 95% or more in both mortality and incidence seem possible." — Dario Amodei, same essay, on cancer

"Doubling of the human lifespan. This might seem radical, but life expectancy increased almost 2x in the 20th century, so it's 'on trend' that the 'compressed 21st' would double it again to 150." — Dario Amodei, same essay

"In the early 2030s we can expect to reach longevity escape velocity where every year of life we lose through ageing we get back from scientific progress." — Ray Kurzweil, Observer interview

"My first plan is to stay alive, therefore reaching longevity escape velocity. I take about 80 pills a day to help keep me healthy. Cryogenic freezing is the fallback." — Ray Kurzweil

"You can make that mRNA vaccine, you can make that robotically again using AI in about 48 hours." — Larry Ellison, at the White House announcement of the $500bn Stargate project, January 2025

And then there is the cosmic wing

"In 2050 there will be trillions of self-replicating robot factories on the asteroid belt." — Jürgen Schmidhuber, at WIRED2016, immediately followed by "A few million years later, AI will colonize the galaxy"

"It may sound strange, but I think I was born to realize ASI. I am super serious about it." — Masayoshi Son, SoftBank shareholders' meeting, June 2024

"We believe the global population can quite easily expand to 50 billion people or more." — Marc Andreessen, The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

"I'll go down this thread with GPT or Grok and I'll start to get to the edge of what's known in quantum physics and then I'm doing the equivalent of vibe coding, except it's vibe physics." — Travis Kalanick, co-founder of Uber, on the All-In podcast

"Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on." — Larry Ellison, describing AI-supervised mass camera surveillance to Oracle's financial analysts, as a selling point

The remaining ninety-odd are in the game, and every one of those carries its source too. You are invited to check them.