I'm about twenty minutes into The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist and I had to pause it.
Not because it's bad. It's excellent. The directors interviewed Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis, and about 40 other researchers and technologists across the AI landscape, from the most optimistic builders to the people who think we're making a serious mistake. It premiered at Sundance in January, opened in theaters in late March, and it's now on Apple TV. If you have any interest in where this technology is headed, it's worth your time.
I paused it because one of the experts started describing what AGI will feel like when it arrives. The specific characteristics he listed: AI writing its own code, multiple AI instances compounding each other's output, agents coordinating with other agents, an exponential curve that builds faster than most people notice until it's already well underway. He was framing all of it as something coming. Something to brace for. Something that would mark a before and after.
I recognized it as something that's already happening.
The film was shot over roughly three years starting in early 2023. The interviews were locked before October 2024, when Focus Features acquired distribution rights ahead of the Sundance premiere. In most industries, that timeline would make it current. In AI, late 2024 is a different era entirely. The distance between that moment and today isn't measured well in months. It's measured in capabilities.
Claude Code, which didn't exist when most of these interviews were filmed, writes and improves its own code. It is, in a very literal sense, the thing they were describing. Sub-agents spin up other agents. Multiple instances run in parallel, each handling a different workstream, compounding output in ways that would have sounded like science fiction during the production of this film. The specific behaviors the experts in this documentary flagged as the indicators we should watch for, the ones that would tell us AGI was approaching, are the behaviors that practitioners are working with as normal tools right now.
That's a strange thing to sit with while watching a documentary that was advertised as one of the most timely and urgent films of the moment. It is timely. It's also, through no fault of its own, already describing a world that has moved on from the one it was made in.
Don't be frustrated with the filmmakers for this. They moved fast, they were rigorous, and they captured something genuinely important on camera. The range of perspectives they assembled, the access they got, the way they held the tension between catastrophe and optimism without resolving it cheaply, all of that holds up. Watch it.
Just know that the things the experts in this film were most worried about as signs of AGI, the things they were describing with anxiety as a future we needed to prepare for, are happening right now. As you watch it. That's what made me put down the remote.