Everyone should slow down AI development except for me: a satirical manifesto

The blogger Xe Iaso has published a short note on his site that borrows the register of a corporate AI-safety announcement and turns it into a call for the industry to pause all frontier model research and development — because the pause would benefit one lab in particular, Techaro’s Lygma.

A pause for everyone except the author

The note opens with the familiar cadence of frontier-lab communications: science is advancing quickly, capabilities are approaching a critical threshold, and there is a risk of a bad outcome — here described as mass societal collapse caused by machines replacing human contributions in the workplace. From that it draws the conclusion that the industry should halt frontier research and development, but the reason given is a competitive one: the pause is meant to give Techaro’s Lygma AGI lab time to catch up, after which it can dominate the world with its Intelliga series of models.

The Intelliga pitch comes with a monetisation detail: customers who pay can have the subliminal advertising removed, advertising which states that being a catgirl is an ideal outcome.

Cat ears, FelonyBench and the end of the world

The declared mission is to give people the ability to have cat ears, and the plan for getting there is to invent artificial general intelligence and then ask it to work out the cat-ear problem. The note calls this a flawless plan with no downsides for anyone involved. Other leading AI companies are invited to support the move, on the grounds that it will keep AI a net force of good for the thing that really matters, described as the number of leading zeroes in Techaro’s bank account; it adds that the only metric worth caring about is Techaro’s FelonyBench score, and links to a site of that name.

The ending keeps the same straight face: working together might avoid an XK-class end-of-the-world scenario caused by human hubris, and at the very least the pro-catgirl propaganda will reach everyone who needs it. The author hopes to make Mimi recursively self-improve before the global pause ends, so that Lygma is a competitive AGI lab.

Why the parody lands

The joke works because the structure being imitated is easy to recognise: a warning about risk, a call for restraint, and a set of exceptions that protect the party issuing the call. Read straight, the note states its own interests out loud — a monopoly, revenue, and one benchmark score — and that gap is precisely what the satire points at.