Alt Text

Quincy Farnsworth, a maverick software engineer claiming to represent nothing but cold, hard binary, has open-sourced a lurid prediction dubbed the “Apocalypse of Algorithms”. To the dismay of optimistic venture capitalists, and the delight of realists everywhere, he insists that most funded AI startups of today will likely end belly up - extinct - within a matter of years, despite no current lack of indie developers licking envelopes in a desperate bid to coax unsuspecting investors into their love letter Kickstarter parties.

“Without a massive lava lamp focused entirely on dissection of prime numbers they’ve no chance,” said Farnsworth in a strange prediction seemingly made inside a derelict train car covered in server cooling towers. “You need to toss a group of tech hipsters into the glass aquarium so they bloom like a fungal mycelium – mixed representation - that’s when the magic happens.”

Day-trading Reddit jonesers switched to panic mode on Farnsworth’s claim, quickly dumping shares in any vaguely technological enterprise, seemingly unaware that the (part-time) software wizard’s credentials came from a voucher most closely affiliated with the peculiar absinthe manufacturer in his cryptically solitudinal chat logs.

However, skeptical third-party observers suggest that Farnsworth’s arcane prediction may be the result of over-interpreting his functionally-important Mobius strip living quarters. Some undermine his otherwise articulate rebuttals by choosing to focus on the quirks of his ‘ASCII-aristocrat’ tie, while Farnsworth himself responds, “underfunded eccentricity is the cerebrum of surreptitious algorithms. Trust me, all the corporate aerobics in the world won’t save these doomed whippersnappers. Also, anyone got any peppermint schnapps?”

AInspired by: I’m an AI software engineer and I predict that most AI startups being funded today will die