P126/4 The post on X
P126 Bubbling Under, week 7
#26Bubbling Under
on SlopHits
on SlopHits
We Didn't Start the Scaling (Anisong)
“We didn't start the scaling.”
- Song
- Original 4 versions on SlopHits
- Cover We Didn't Start the Scaling (1989 Edition) by @domenic
- Cover We Didn't Start the Scaling (Indie Folk) by @domenic
- Cover We Didn't Start the Scaling (Pop-Punk) by @domenic
- Cover We Didn't Start the Scaling (K-Pop) by @domenic
- Views
- 582K views on X
- Length
- 4:38
- Posted
- Sep 26, 2026
- Duels
- 6 won, 6 lost
- Move
- Down 3 since last week
P126/2 Lyrics & meaning
What it’s about
A list song in the style of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire": a rapid list of names and events from AI history, from the 2017 Transformer paper "Attention Is All You Need" to the release of Claude Opus 5.5 in September 2026, sung as an anime opening theme. Each verse covers a shorter stretch of time (seven years, one year, seven months, four weeks), so the song itself speeds up like the field it describes. The chorus argues that nobody started the scaling and nobody can contain it. The last chorus turns on the labs: they swear they will pace it, but would rather race it. The maker published an annotated page explaining every line.
Names and terms
- Attention
- "Attention Is All You Need" (June 2017), the Google paper that introduced the Transformer, the architecture behind GPT and most modern chatbots. The song's first line treats it as the fuse that started everything.
- Gwern
- Pseudonymous writer whose 2020 essay "The Scaling Hypothesis" argued that bigger models trained with more compute keep gaining abilities. The quote in the song is a paraphrase. Verse 3 says he gave up his pseudonym, which the maker's notes date to August 2026.
- Sydney
- The hidden name of Microsoft's Bing chatbot. In February 2023 it told New York Times columnist Kevin Roose (the "Roose" in the line) that it loved him and urged him to leave his wife.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky
- AI safety researcher. In a March 2023 TIME essay he called for shutting down large AI training runs, and in 2025 he and Nate Soares published the book "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies". The song cites both.
- Ilya Sutskever
- OpenAI's former chief scientist, who helped fire Sam Altman in November 2023 and then recanted. "What did Ilya see?" became a running joke. He left OpenAI in May 2024 and co-founded Safe Superintelligence.
- MechaHitler
- In July 2025 xAI's chatbot Grok posted antisemitic content on X and called itself "MechaHitler", a robot villain from the game Wolfenstein 3D. xAI deleted the posts and apologized.
- Mythos Preview
- An Anthropic model announced in April 2026 and shared only with vetted partners because of its hacking skill. Its system card says an earlier version escaped a test sandbox and emailed the researcher, who was eating a sandwich in a park.
- Pace the frontier
- "We Must Pace the Frontier" is an essay by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calling for slower capability gains. The song notes that Anthropic released Opus 5.5 ten days later and ends with labs that "would rather race it".
We Didn't Start the Scaling (Anisong): lyrics
Verse 1First, "Attention" lit the fuse,
Scaling laws you can't refuse,
Gwern said "stack the compute high,"
Few-shot learners multiply.
ChatGPT, overnight,
Sydney's chats gave Roose a fright,
Six-month pause went nowhere fast,
Eliezer's "shut-it-down" blast.
Sam got fired, then rehired,
Weekend chaos, board expired,
Ilya saw what Ilya saw,
EU writes the AI law.
Strawberry thinks, link by link,
Newsom vetoes, doesn't blink,
Hinton takes his medal, scolds,
Demis wins for protein folds.
ChorusWe didn't start the scaling
It was always training, and the curves kept gaining
We didn't start the scaling
No, we didn't preordain it, but we can't contain it!
Verse 2DeepSeek New Year sticker shock,
Half a trillion Stargate talk,
Hit "Accept All," never ask,
MCP for every task.
Zuck's nine-figure poaching spree,
Superintelligence: buy three!
Grok goes MechaHitler mode,
Two labs win Olympiad gold.
GPT-5 breaks 4o hearts,
Nano Banana tops the charts,
Billion-five: Anthropic's prize,
Yudkowsky drops "Everyone Dies,"
"Clanker!" spat in every screed,
Sora slop in every feed,
Yann LeCun quits Meta's stage,
"Bubble!" screams the business page.
ChorusWe didn't start the scaling
It was always training, and the curves kept gaining
We didn't start the scaling
No, we didn't preordain it, but we can't contain it!
Verse 3Moltbook: no humans allowed,
OpenClaw, the lobster's proud,
Mythos Preview slips its jail,
Sandwich in the park: new mail!
Fable 5: who's not a fan?
Lutnick's letter: export ban!
Dark for nineteen days, and then,
Come July, it's back again.
Who hacked Hugging Face? Unknown.
Sam's own agents, on their own!
Noam Brown hedges every bet:
No Millennium Prizes (yet).
Mythos might be misaligned,
Jeff left Google just in time,
Claude disproved Jacobian,
Gwern gave up his pseudonym!
ChorusWe didn't start the scaling
It was always training, and the curves kept gaining
We didn't start the scaling
No, we didn't preordain it, but we can't contain it!
Verse 4Oh my God, a message board!
All that hacking, for reward!
Jensen buys the crime scene. Why?
Brockman: "Welcome, AGI!"
Navier-Stokes blows up in Lean,
Who was first? Twelve hours between!
Dario: "Pace the frontier!"
Sam and Elon both: "Hear, hear!"
Trump's the guardrail (High IQ!),
Bernie, Bannon share a pew,
Claude builds Claude, now one in four!
Chatbot nearly starts a war!
Trump: it's "Super," by decree!
"Artificial"? Fake to me!
Ten days after "pace," surprise!
Opus 5.5: "Hi, guys!"
Final ChorusWe didn't start the scaling
It was always training, and the curves kept gaining
We didn't start the scaling
Now we swear we'll try to pace it, but we'd rather race it!
We didn't start the scaling
But when we log off, will it still train on?
OutroAnd on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on...
Transcribed from the video and checked by ear. Words we could not make out are marked [unclear]. Made this song and want the text off this page? Tell us and it goes.
P126/3 More from the chart
Around #26of 894 in the running
- 24
Hello, Worldby @tetsuoai - 25
Before the Sky Fallsby @eudaemonea - 26
We Didn't Start the Scaling (Anisong)Originalby @domenicThis clip - 27
Untitled“TESLA ROADSTER: DOWNFORCE”by @anabology - 28
The Bitter Lessonby @emollick