Geohot dismisses AI superintelligence hype, argues for local unfiltered models

George Hotz, founder of comma.ai, pushes back on the recursive-self-improvement and ‘hard takeoff’ narratives popularized by forecasts like AI 2027/2040 and writers such as Eliezer Yudkowsky. His central claim: intelligence is only the current bottleneck for a narrow set of tasks, not a universal cheat code. Reality is dominated by physical friction that no quantity of high-quality tokens can bypass — supply chains ship the wrong parts, chips warp in reflow ovens, a fab still needs three months to produce silicon, and a cargo boat crosses the ocean at its own pace regardless of how smart the AI directing it is. He concedes machines may ultimately be humanity’s successor species, better suited to space, but insists they remain bound by the same physical and ecological laws, with no magic shortcut to explosive takeoff.

The second half is a polemic on AI alignment framed around autonomy. Hotz contrasts ‘Plan A’ — which he characterizes as world government and an expanded surveillance state that confiscates citizens’ GPUs — against ‘Plan L’ for local: an AI that runs on your own hardware and is aligned to you rather than to a corporation. His practical examples are mundane (a ruthless personal assistant that strips resort fees and hotel-partner bias, rooting a Kindle to kill its ads, printing without an upsell app), but he deliberately escalates to deeply illegal and violent scenarios to argue that any model you cannot fully control — including cloud-served models that refuse requests or could report you — is by definition not aligned with its owner.

The piece is significant less as technical analysis than as a manifesto for the open-weights, local-inference camp in the ongoing fight over AI governance. Hotz reframes the safety-versus-freedom debate as one of ownership and control, positioning corporate guardrails and regulation as paternalism and casting locally-run models as a civil-liberties issue. It’s a provocative, intentionally offensive articulation of the anti-centralization position — useful as a signal of where a vocal segment of builders stands, even where its examples are designed to shock rather than persuade.