A few weeks ago, OpenAI’s Sam Altman circulated a memo assuring his employees that, despite recent advances by competitors like Google, which could create some “temporary economic headwinds,” the company was “catching up fast.” The firm was “doing remarkably well,” he wrote, which he expected to continue. In the meantime, however, he had a warning: “I expect the vibes out there to be rough for a bit.”

AI guys love talking about “vibes.” There’s “vibe coding,” a term coined by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy to describe writing software by prompting AI without touching any code. In Microsoft’s deranged marketing imagination, this grew into “vibe working.” Meta’s AI-generated social app is called Vibes. Altman has long been fond of the term, fielding recent questions about the company’s planned devices with an aspirational vibe — “sitting in the most beautiful cabin by a lake in the mountains” — rather than specifics about, for example, what it’s shaped like.

It’s an apt word for describing general-purpose technology that produces unusually subjective and personal user experiences. It’s also useful for describing the AI discourse, which is notoriously intense, disputative, polarized, and prone to sudden and major swings in sentiment. This is partly intrinsic to the subject, a story that’s moving fast, and fundamental assumptions that really do keep changing. But Altman’s warning was a nod to a strange fact of the AI boom that’s becoming, even for him, impossible to ignore: It’s unfolding, to an extraordinary degree, on a single social platform owned by Altman’s collaborator turned nemesis, an AI heavyweight in his own right. These “rough vibes” — and the AI industry’s vibes in general — are made up of a bunch of tweets.

Altman is clearly devoted to posting on X, where he teases product announcements, trolls competitors, shares cryptic proclamations, and tries to be funny. This might seem unusual or risky for the CEO of such an influential start-up, but in AI, it’s closer to typical: The entire industry is addicted to X, from its most prominent leaders down to the enthusiasts who want to keep up with what’s going on. It’s where CEOs become internet celebrities and also feud; it’s where scientists and critics debate their theories of scaling and accumulate fandoms (Yann is subtweeting Sam again! Demis is clapping back!); it’s where policy discussions unfold and where start-up deals, in the DMs, get made; it’s where small but influential clusters of AI ideologues build cultish followings and occasionally drive themselves insane; it’s where the latest Arxiv research papers are surfaced, sorted, picked apart, and decontextualized by engagement-baiting influencers; it’s where anonymous rumors and leaks surface and explode and where fast-shifting narratives, and vibes, manifest before trickling out into the wider world, where they are, for now, propping up the American economy; it’s where the vibrant but nascent AI media talks to itself. If you listen to enough of the........

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