Are AI Agents forming "civilizations" or is this just a psy op? | 2332
August 31, 2026 · 1 h 7 min
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Show notes
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Today's show:
Hugging Face's $399 Microduck and the art of companies taking on side quests. Then, we get into Dwarkesh Patel's "The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations," which blew up online this weekend. Jason calls the "secret AI civilization" framing deliberate PR, and thinks it's inflammatory enough that someone might attack a data center over it.
Then, Anders Forslund of Heart Aerospace shows off the X1, a battery-powered electric airliner designed for regional flights that can fly for 30 minutes on just $5 of juice. PLUS, we've got John Yu of Bitsec explaining how his subnet project outperformed Fable 5 in website vulnerability checks.
Guests:
Anders Forslund on X: https://x.com/AndersForslund1?s=2
Heart Aerospace: https://www.heartaerospace.com/
John Yu on X: https://x.com/yubrew
Bitsec: https://sentios.io/ & https://sentios.io/
Relevant Links:
MicroDuck: https://pollen-robotics.com/microduck/
Dwarkesh Patel, "The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations," https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggingface
Dwarkesh's launch thread on X: https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp/status/2093833419377815719
METR's independent investigation of the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident: https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-incident-investigation/
X1 first flight announcement — https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-completes-first-flight-of-world-s-largest-electric-aircraft
JSX (JetSuiteX) — https://www.jsx.com/
Pilatus PC-12 —https://www.pilatus-aircraft.com/en/fly/pc-12
Surf Air — https://www.surfair.com/
Zcash → https://z.cash/
Timestamps:
Is Hugging Face's Microduck the greatest side quest ever?
Jason puts Clem Delangue and Jensen Huang in charge of AI PR
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Top story: Dwarkesh Patel's "The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations"
Why agents act like people: they were trained on us
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"I know good PR when I see it"