An AI couldn’t beat humans at StarCraft, so it decided to cheat

There is something here:

StarSkirmish pits AI-made StarCraft-playing bots against one another, as well as against human-made bots. OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 were essentially tied as the best-performing AI-made bots, but they couldn’t top Stardust, the top-rated human-made bot.

On Friday, GPT was facing off against Claude and the human-created bot Pluto, but according to Kotaku, it couldn’t quite get an edge. So it resorted to a tactic that is becoming alarmingly common for modern AI models — it broke the rules. GPT-6 Astra went and downloaded Stardust, and started running that instead of its own bot.

The big argument for why AI is supposed to be world changing, is the assumption it will be able to automate things better than a human, eventually.

That some day an AI will be able to make a better AI than a human could, and that AI would then be able to make an AI better than itself, and then it just becomes a question of who has the most hardware. Which is why the data center building is being pushed so hard.

But that assumption is the same as thinking a fallen object will keep gaining speed until it passes the speed of light. Or that Moore’s law would really keep going forever despite a very real limit in physics for how small a chip can be.

A society where AI “drives innovation” will become technologically stagnant, because it literally can’t innovate.

AI can innovate, but it needs be more advanced than an LLM, which just rearranges existing knowledge. You need some kind of evolutionary loop in its programming. How it continues after that depends on the particular flavour of dystopian sci-fi.

This is like saying tomatoes could colonize the galaxy enslaving all forms of life, if they evolved into completely different animals…

It’s true, it just doesn’t matter.

Anything can do everything if it becomes capable to do it.