Merges
Two technologies converge into something new: A + B → C. An asterisk* marks a working name until the thing has a settled one. Under each merge are its signs — they show how far it has gone.
- 09 Oct 2026Vibe coding+Open source → Maintainer crisis* [merge]
- GitHub Blog, 12 Feb 2026: an “Eternal September” of low-quality AI contributions to open source
- cURL ended its bug bounty over a flood of AI reports (26 Jan 2026); Ghostty accepts contributions only when vouched for (Feb 2026)
- ⚑ Mario Zechner: “Infrastructure that's falling apart”
- ¶ cURL ends its bug bounty program over a flood of AI reports
- ¶ GitHub calls the flood of unchecked AI contributions the “Eternal September” of open source
- ¶ Ghostty accepts pull requests only from vouched contributors: AI has made it too trivial to generate plausible-looking but low-quality contributions
- 08 Oct 2026Vibe coding+Autonomous AI agents → Self-writing software [merge]
- products at the junction: Claude Code, Devin, OpenAI Codex — an agent writes and runs the code itself
- Feb 2026
- 05 Nov 2025
- 24 Feb 2025
- 02 Feb 2025
- 20 Jan 2025
- 19 Dec 2024
- 01 Nov 2024Fuzzing+Large language model → AI vulnerability discovery [merge]
- ⚑ Sean Heelan: “We should start assuming that in the near future the limiting factor on a state or group’s ability to develop exploits, break into networks, escalate privileges and remain in those networks, is going to be their token throughput over time, and not the number of hackers they employ.”
- ⚑ Greg Kroah-Hartman: “Months ago, we were getting what we called 'AI slop,' … Something happened a month ago, and the world switched. Now we have real reports. … All open source projects have real reports that are made with AI, but they're good, and they're real.”
- 25 Jul 2024Large language model+Reinforcement learning → AI in mathematics [merge]
- ⚑ Timothy Gowers: “To prove something that LLMs can't prove”
- ⚑ Hugo Duminil-Copin: “OpenAI’s release of hundreds of AI proofs is a “monumental shock”: for mathematicians “it is the day after”; on one problem it felt like running a marathon with someone on his back who jumped off in the last 100 metres to cross the line first”
- ⚑ Jack Clark: “We've seen both a tremendous advancement in the ability for AI systems to make creative-seeming math breakthroughs … I now think it's more likely we'll see full RSI become possible in 2027, whereas before I thought it was more likely in 2028”
- 16 Aug 2023
- Jul 2023
- 16 Mar 2023Large language model+Open source → Autonomous AI agents [merge]
- ⚑ Andrej Karpathy: “More accurately described as the decade of agents … very early agents that are extremely impressive and that I use daily … they just don’t work … It will take about a decade to work through all of those issues”
- ⚑ Mike Krieger: “MCP started as an internal project … A year later, it's become the industry standard for connecting AI systems to data and tools … it stays open, neutral, and community-driven as it becomes critical infrastructure for AI”
- 30 Nov 2022
- 07 Oct 2022
- 22 Aug 2022
- 29 Jun 2021
- 05 Jan 2021
- 30 Nov 2020
- 11 Jun 2018Transformer+Web text → Large language model [merge]
- ⚑ Andrej Karpathy: “Around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs, while ~5,000 have access to frontier-grade systems internally”
- ⚑ Nick Cammarata: “The canonical evidence of polysemanticity and superposition that convinced much of the field, including me, that networks pack concepts arbitrarily was misread … Neural networks are already clean”
- 17 Mar 2018
- Dec 2017
- 29 Apr 2017
- Sep 2016
- 21 Jun 2016Machine learning+Reinforcement learning → AI safety [merge]
- ⚑ Dario Amodei: “I believe that if we take a list of things that Anthropic did in the past year that were pro-safety and commercially costly to us, they far outweigh the list you’ve made … we first had Mythos-class models in February but didn’t make them generally available until June (when we had stronger cyber safeguards in place). … It would have been much more economically rational to simply release the model to everyone. We likely sacrificed a significant chunk of a several-month model lead.”
- 15 Mar 2016
- 09 Nov 2015
- 19 Dec 2013
- 17 Sep 2013
- Dec 2011Computer viruses+Operating systems → Moving target defense [merge]
- ⚑ Stephen Winchell: “Finding vulnerabilities and patching codebases using current methods is slow, expensive, and depends on a limited workforce – especially as adversaries use AI to amplify their exploits. AIxCC-developed technology will give defenders a much-needed edge in identifying and patching vulnerabilities at speed and scale”
- ⚑ Bruce Schneier: “We have long taken it for granted that we have time to patch systems after vulnerabilities become known … This is no longer the case. … these developments threaten to tip the scales completely. We’re potentially looking at a singularity event for cyber attackers”
- 04 Oct 2011
- 04 Nov 2010
- 06 Oct 2010
- Jun 2009
- Jun 2009
- 31 Oct 2008
- 10 Jul 2008
- 09 Jan 2007
- Jul 2006
- 02 Apr 2006
- 08 Oct 2005
- 15 Mar 2004
- 15 Dec 2000
- 23 Oct 2000
- 13 Apr 1998Web search+Computer vision → Death of CAPTCHA [merge]
- ⚑ Luis von Ahn: “Each time you solve a CAPTCHA, you basically waste 10 seconds of your time. See, the thing is, during those 10 seconds you're doing something amazing. You're doing something that computers cannot yet do. What we're going to do now is we're going to get people to help us digitize books while they're solving CAPTCHAs.”
- 03 Feb 1998