Fun fact, there is no historical evidence of an adult human ever dying from a cheetah attack. They are naturally shy, and a lot smaller than you may realize.
Cheetahs are very fast, but humans have way more endurance.
Try not to read the Wikipedia as it might spoil the short story, there’s the pdf available on the web somewhere
Because otherwise, 'it' will just back out of your trap and go along to continue to follow, wouldn't it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon
> The Man versus Horse Marathon is an annual race over 21 miles (34 km), where runners compete against riders on horseback through a mix of road, trail and mountainous terrain. The race, which is a shorter distance than an official marathon road race, takes place in the Welsh town of Llanwrtyd Wells every June.
> ...
> The event started in 1980, when local landlord Gordon Green overheard a discussion between two men in his pub, the Neuadd Arms. One man suggested that over a significant distance across country, man was equal to any horse. Green decided that the challenge should be tested in full public view, and organised the first event.
While the horses had a string of wins from 2008 to 2019, 2022 to 2025 had three wins for humans and one win for a horse.
The next race event: https://www.green-events.co.uk/man-v-horse
I don't think the Mongol cavalry would lose races to humans over any distance of steppe
https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/hu...
> Lobb’s victory came on a hot day, as did Florian Holzinger’s subsequent victory in 2007—a significant detail, according to a new study in the journal Experimental Physiology from Lewis Halsey of the University of Roehampton in Britain and Caleb Bryce of the Botswana Predator Conservation Trust. Halsey and Bryce gathered historical data from three endurance races that pit humans against horses, including the Man Versus Horse Marathon, to test the idea that humans are uniquely adapted to run for long distances in hot weather.
> This idea has been around since the 1980s, and it gained prominence when Harvard anthropologist Daniel Lieberman and University of Utah biologist Dennis Bramble published a 2004 Nature paper hypothesizing that running had “substantially shaped human evolution.” They argued that our ability to keep running at a moderate pace even on hot days allowed us to run prey like kudu to exhaustion or outcompete other animals in the race to scavenge carcasses left by other large predators.
There's a plot with the analysis of the Old Dominion with weather stations in there that show a steeper negative slope for horses compared to the humans.
> Overall, for every increase of 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), the horses slowed down by about 1 percent—or 0.07 miles per hour, to be precise. The humans, on the other hand, slowed down by just 0.04 miles per hour for each extra degree of heat. That 36 percent advantage for the humans was statistically significant.
---
For the Man vs Horse, the weather conditions ("Hot", "Rain/sun/windy" - not exact values)... the entry for 2022 was the human winning by 1:51 on a warm day, and 2023 was a human wining by 9:44 on a sweltering day.
There are horse endurance races where the winner arrived in 7,5 hours after 160km[1]. That's a sub 2-hours marathon almost 4 times in a row (not to mention with a guy on your back).
[1] https://eatnstays.com/uaes-almazrouei-wins-almutadil-cup-at-...
https://www.enduranceonline.it/live/cat/V.php?gara_id=1911&v...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon
> ... There are other Man versus Horse races — in Scotland based at Dores, near Loch Ness, in Central North Island, New Zealand and in the U.S. city of Prescott, Arizona.
And the Arizona race page: https://managainsthorse.com
You're right. They're smaller than you probably imagine (about the weight of an average Labrador). That's still definitely big enough to be a problem if they felt threatened, I'm sure, but the animals my friend was in charge of were raised to be around people for outreach purposes. That particular cheetah, for example, had once been on the Today show.
[1] There’s a well known viral video of a wildlife park keeper who sleeps with three cheetahs who behave pretty much like large house cats.
When Dario and others say things like "this is happening and we should probably figure out what to do about it" what ends up happening is people hear "this is happening," see that the person warning them is the person doing the thing, and then short-circuit. "Why can't you just stop then?"
Dario's point, and the point of the people actually trying to solve the problem, is that AI is not just Anthropic and OpenAI. It's the knowledge that you can put more compute in, and get more capability out.
It is a technology now. It exists, in the world. Wishing will not make it go away. Being angry at it will not make it go away. Lying about how much water it uses will not make it go away. If Anthropic and OpenAI Shut down tomorrow, Accenture will not say "oh guess that llm thing won't work, let's go back to hiring humans!"
It is a truth that you can multiply matrices and get something that is economically useful. We cannot un-know this.
Physics allows it, so it will happen. So we should probably figure out what the heck to do about it. If your answer is something along the lines of "restrict it" then 1. let me know how that goes when other people don't, and 2. I really would rather prefer a world where we have the machines do the work the machines can do, not a world where we have human makework. If this means we need to figure out redistribution, let's talk about redistribution!
The only reason that infrastructure buildout is happening at all is the ideological capture of a small handful of obscenely wealthy people, who are fueling this buildout by spreading the extreme paranoia you’re echoing here.
I do not understand why no one else can see the circularity of this reasoning. There is nothing inevitable about tying up all of this productive capital in the pursuit of AI. There are many, many other projects requiring similar capital and human effort, with much more obvious payoffs, such as decarbonizing the world’s energy systems.
“It’s physically possible to provide abundant electricity without burning fossil fuels” is more provably true than any of the insane science fiction bullshit that undergirds the AI buildout, and yet, the entire clean energy industry is still having to build insane financial Rube Goldberg contraptions to make incremental progress.
“Inevitability” is a lie, period. This entire thing is extremely historically contingent, and we could easily stop this train tomorrow.
So, the Baruch Plan?
The Manhattan Project was $~2B in 1945 dollars, and a national-scale industrial mobilization. Now North Korea has the bomb. That's with nuclear material, which doesn't get easier and easier and easier to work with every year.
Compare to the price to train GPT-2 in 2019 ($43,000), and in 2026 ($73) [0].
The point being: the price to train frontier models isn't coming down, nor is it going to come down because for models to remain on the frontier they have to keep getting bigger and bigger (and trained on more and more data).
In the US capitalist context, it's certainly inevitable, because AI is the biggest and most attractive source of profit and power out there right now. In that context, the broad strokes of what's happening currently, including the financial bubble, are predictable and inevitable.
What are the concrete steps which would allow us to "easily stop this train"? And why haven't we used steps like that to stop other cases where obscenely wealthy people have screwed everyone else over to increase their wealth? Is public control of the means of production involved, perhaps? If so, your definition of "easily" and mine are incompatible.
- Labor organizing
I grew up in a union household, and my dad and my grandfather fighting for better wages, healthcare and working conditions are the reason why I got a good education and work in Silicon Valley surrounded by Stanford assholes.
All of us who work for a paycheck can get together and say, “no, we will not allow you to record keystrokes and mouse movements to train our replacements. No, we will not have our performance or future employment based on an AI leaderboard.”
Previous generations fought and died for our right to do that, but in 2026 we just sit on our hands and complain on this forum. We can and should do better.
The U.S. is absolutely on fire right now with opposition to data centers. We, collectively, can extract concessions or ban their construction altogether.
These things aren’t “easy”. They are also eminently possible.
The reality is that the US has been a story of increasing concentration of wealth and power. The people who "fought and died" bought some important (from a human rights perspective) but ultimately minor (from a capitalist perspective) concessions from the capital class. The battle you describe is one of defense of rights, not of gaining control.
The overall system of capitalist control remains unaffected, and it's why the buildout of AI is, in fact, inevitable under the current system.
You're essentially saying no, you want public control of the means of production instead. That might be great, if even a sizable fraction of the US population agreed with you. But due in no small part to decades of propaganda, they don't.
Ok, good luck
I still believe Dario asks these questions in good faith. Nobody believes that about e.g. Sam Altman or Elon Musk. They compared themselves to Oppenheimer because it helped them get attention. When it started an actual regulatory conversation, they were suddenly less worried.
Maybe it would run afoul of antitrust regulations, but it's totally realistic for all those competitors to get together and say "hey, we could really fuck up society in our race to get rich with this tech, lets all slow down." And if these companies are run my mature people who don't subordinate every consideration to greed, they'd to it.
1. Some people have no ethical problems making bombs.
2. Some people have an ethical problem with making bombs so do something else.
3. Some people have an ethical problem with making bombs, but say "well someone else will make it if I don't" so they make bombs.
I think it is reasonable to argue against #3 as a reasonable position.
It only takes one of them to do it and they are not sharing information. If the 1 you remove from N is the one that will discover it, then it will dramatically affect when AGI happens. If it is not, then it will have zero effect.
The latter is far more likely if N>2