Just Stay Alive, AGI Is Coming
I code for a living in Korea. AI coding tools are no longer optional for a developer. They are instead essential survival tools. The problem is that this ecosystem changes too fast and too violently.
The title of the "best" model changes every month. Yesterday, Gemini 2.5 Pro held the crown. Today, Claude Code 4 Opus takes the throne. Tomorrow, GPT-5 Codex might sweep them all away. My workspace tools migrate like seasonal birds based on public evaluation. When servers crash or model intelligence suddenly drops, you need raw data fast. Paradoxically, the quickest place to get this intelligence is the most chaotic sector of the Korean internet.
Let me sketch the landscape for my English readers. We have a site called DC Inside. It started as a digital camera community, so its message boards are still called "galleries." Think of it as Reddit with minimal accountability. You do not even need an account to post. It is truly the wild west of the Korean web. While you might guess the tech crowd hangs out in the AI gallery, you would be wrong. Instead, they gather in a place called the "Singularity Is Coming" gallery. I constantly lurk there to gather benchmark data on the latest models, but I also witness something else entirely. This place, named after Ray Kurzweil’s book, has mutated from a simple tech community into a massive religion.
Every gallery has volunteer moderators who swing the "ban hammer" without hesitation. If you argue that AGI is still years away, you get an immediate IP ban. I am not debating free speech here because this is strictly a punishment for blasphemy. The moderators and the die-hard users share a simple logic. Anyone who doubts Kurzweil is considered a heretic or a troll. They eagerly await the next update. They fully expect it to miraculously announce the descent of the Machine God.
The users repeat a single mantra like a spell. "Just stay alive." This means that no matter how miserable reality gets, you only need to endure it for another five or ten years until AGI becomes your savior. I am not talking about simple automation or basic universal income. That is thinking small. They believe code will evolve into Artificial Superintelligence on its own. It will become a god that solves the energy crisis and unlocks fully immersive virtual reality. Their endgame is absolute. They aim to plug everyone into a personal Matrix where they can rule as deities.
This is not a secret fringe theory. If you lurk for just a few days, you will realize that this absolute conviction is the dominant sentiment governing the entire community. Critics call large language models "stochastic parrots." They argue that simply scaling up parameters does not create true intelligence. They point out the hard physical limits of data, power consumption, and the massive cost of moving atoms. As an engineer, I know those technical barriers intimately well.
Yet, I cannot mock the believers. Their obsession is not born from stupidity, but from pure desperation. Young Koreans today cannot buy homes with their labor income alone. Marriage has become a fantasy. Instead of bowing to their ancestors, they pray to NVIDIA GPUs and beg a graphics card for salvation.
This is no longer technology. It is a sad religion.
Nietzsche declared that God is dead, yet he failed to kill the human instinct to worship. Science dismantled the old altars, but it did not erase the thirst for a savior. Now, a modern cult has learned to hide inside an unfalsifiable future. Because a timeline cannot be tested, the believers simply push the deadline back if a predicted date slips. In their scenario, the Machine God will generate infinite energy, conquer the cosmos, and circle back to Simulation Theory to lead us into a simulated paradise.
They tell each other to "just stay alive." They are pressing the "pause" button on their lives for a savior that might never arrive. Vague waiting is not living, and I refuse to do that. In an imperfect world, I will keep building imperfect things.
The Machine God can have eternity. I will claim today.