Alright, settle down, grab a smoke if you got one. Jesus, Monday afternoon already? Feels like Friday night’s hangover just cleared. Barely. Stumbled across some news that nearly made me spill my coffee – which, trust me, is mostly cheap bourbon this time of day. Apparently, the brainiacs churning out these Large Language Models, these goddamn chatbots that are supposed to change the world, have decided the best way to measure their fancy new toys is by their… vibes.
Yeah, you heard me. Vibes.
Like we’re judging a Haight-Ashbury love-in circa ‘67, not billions of dollars worth of silicon and code designed to mimic human thought, or at least, human typing. Sam Altman, the golden boy over at OpenAI, is apparently tweeting about the “magic” and the “vibes.” Good vibes, bad vibes. Groovy, man.
Let me get this straight. For years, these guys banged on about benchmarks, metrics, TTFT, TPS – a whole alphabet soup of quantifiable data to prove their machine was bigger, faster, smarter than the other guy’s machine. Sounded like a pissing contest down at the local dive, only with algorithms instead of… well, you know. Now, suddenly, the numbers aren’t enough. Now it’s about the feeling you get from the AI. The aura. The je ne sais quoi.
Give me a goddamn break. Need another cigarette just thinking about it.
Look, I spent years slinging mail, dealing with actual humans in all their messy, unpredictable glory. Then I crawled into technical writing, translating engineer-speak into something resembling English for manuals nobody read. Now I write this slop. Point is, I know bullshit when I smell it, and this “vibes” nonsense reeks worse than a backed-up toilet in a Skid Row motel.
It’s a salesman’s trick, plain and simple. A Jedi mind trick, like the article says. Your numbers look like dogshit compared to the competition? Your AI hallucinates more than a wino on cheap cough syrup? No problem! Just lean back, puff out your chest, and declare, “Yeah, but the vibes, man. The vibes are immaculate.”
Who’s gonna argue? Vibes are like farts in the wind – you might sense ’em, but you can’t pin ’em down. It’s subjective. It’s “in the eye of the beholder.” Which is mighty convenient if you’re the one selling the beholder the AI. “Oh, you don’t feel the good vibes? Maybe you’re just not sensitive enough, pal. Maybe you lack the necessary gestalt sense.” Gestalt sense. Christ. Sounds like something you’d hear at a poetry reading where everyone snaps instead of claps. Probably costs $50 a ticket, too.
They’re trying to tell us these things are developing some kind of personality, some soul. That quantitative measures don’t capture the whole picture. They use the analogy: “You wouldn’t measure a person solely by their height, weight, and other quantifiable metrics.” True enough. You wouldn’t measure a woman just by her dimensions; you measure her by the way she laughs, the fire in her eyes, the way she tells you to get lost, the way she makes you feel alive or dead or usually both at the same damn time. That’s chemistry. That’s life. That’s a messy, glorious, often painful human thing.
Trying to apply that to a pile of code? That’s not just wrong, it’s insulting. It’s anthropomorphism cranked up to eleven by people who probably interact more with screens than with actual, breathing humans. They want us to feel for the machine, to connect with it on some ephemeral level, probably so we don’t notice when it starts writing our paychecks or deciding if we get a loan. It’s like trying to gauge the ‘vibe’ of your toaster. Does it toast with passion? Does it resonate with the bread on a deep, spiritual level? Who gives a damn? Does it burn the toast or not? That’s the metric that matters when you’re hungry.
This whole “vibe coding” thing mentioned, initiated by another AI luminary? Sounds like whispering sweet nothings to your computer, trying to coax the ‘right’ feeling out of it. It’s programming by mood ring. What’s next? Sacrificing a goat to the server rack for better response times? Reading the machine’s tarot cards to debug the code?
Let’s look at the reasons they trot out for this vibe-centric approach, according to the article I just squinted at through a haze of smoke and cheap whiskey fumes:
Now, the counterarguments, the ones that make actual goddamn sense to someone who’s spent more time staring at the bottom of a glass than at lines of code:
The author of that piece I read seems resigned. “Vibes are here to stay,” they sigh. Probably right. It’s too easy, too fuzzy, too marketable. Trying to argue against it is like trying to argue with a drunk – pointless and likely to end with something getting broken.
Then they propose fighting fire with fire: quantify the vibes. Break it down. Measure conversational flow, sentiment alignment, user ratings. Create a standard for vibes. Jesus H. Christ. That’s like trying to write a mathematical formula for a hangover. Sure, you could measure dehydration levels, blood alcohol content remnants, hours of sleep lost, decibels of skull-pounding… but does that capture the sheer existential dread, the taste of regret, the profound certainty that you are, in fact, dying? No.
Trying to quantify vibes misses the whole damn point of what vibes are, even in the human sense. They’re subjective, fleeting, irrational. Trying to nail them down with metrics is like trying to bottle lightning bugs – by the time you get the lid on, the light’s gone out. It’s the ultimate bureaucratic solution to a mystical problem: if you can’t understand it, measure it to death until it stops moving.
So, we’re stuck between snake-oil salesmen hawking digital ‘vibes’ and spreadsheet jockeys trying to quantify the unquantifiable. Wonderful. It’s enough to make a man reach for the bottle. Which I’m doing right now.
Maybe the real measure isn’t the AI’s vibes, but the vibes it gives us. Does it make you feel smarter, or just stupider for talking to a machine? Does it solve a real problem, or just create new ones? Does it make the world feel more connected, or more depressingly artificial? Does it make you want to create something beautiful, or just drink yourself into oblivion?
For me, right now, reading about billionaire tech gods talking about the ‘vibes’ of their algorithms… yeah, it’s definitely inspiring the latter. The vibe I’m getting is one of profound absurdity, a world gone so far up its own technological ass it’s forgotten what it means to be human.
Maybe that’s the real test. An AI doesn’t have good vibes until it can understand the crushing beauty of a hangover, the melancholy poetry of a rainy Tuesday morning, the desperate hope in a dive bar at 1 AM. Until it can look at the whole damn mess of humanity and just… shrug. And maybe pour itself a virtual drink.
Until then, it’s all just marketing smoke and digital mirrors. Good vibes? Show me an AI that can write a decent poem about cheap whiskey and loneliness. Then we’ll talk.
Alright, enough of this. My glass is empty again. Time to assess the vibes of this bottle of bourbon. They seem… promising.
Chinaski out. Keep pouring.
Source: Why Sam Altman And Others Are Now Using Vibes As A New Gauge For The Latest Progress In AI