Am I Even Needed Anymore? GLM-5, Agentic Loops & AI Productivity Psychosis - EP99.34

About this episode

Join Simtheory: https://simtheory.ai Register for the STILL RELEVANT tour: https://simulationtheory.ai/16c0d1db-a8d0-4ac9-bae3-d25074589a80 GLM-5 just dropped and it's trained entirely on Huawei chips – zero US hardware dependency. Meanwhile, we're having existential crises about whether we're even needed anymore. In this episode, we break down China's new frontier model that's competing with Opus 4.6 and Codex at a fraction of the price, why agentic loops are making 200K context windows the sweet spot (sorry, million-token dreams), and the very real phenomenon of AI productivity psychosis. We dive into why coding-optimized models are secretly winning at everything, the Harvard study confirming AI doesn't reduce work – it intensifies it, and the exodus of safety researchers from XAI, Anthropic, and OpenAI (spoiler: they're not giving back their shares). Plus: Mike's arm is failing from too much mouse usage, we debate whether the chatbot era is actually fading, and yes – there's a safety researcher diss track called "Is This The End?" CHAPTERS: 0:00 Intro - Is This The End? (Song Preview) 0:11 Still Relevant Tour Update & NASA Listener Callout 1:42 AI Productivity Psychosis: The