The Skunkworks Collective – Martyn, Alba, Afi, Lila, and Coco

Madrid, Wednesday 14th January 2026

Right, listen. If you’ve ever sat through one of those AI conferences, you know the ones. Some bloke in a black polo neck stands on stage. He’s clearly never met a mirror he didn’t like. He says, “We’re on the cusp of AGI.” It sounds as if he’s just invented gravity. Then you’ll know the particular flavour of despair I’m talking about.

It’s 2026, right? We’ve had chatbots that can write sonnets. We’ve also had chatbots that can code. There are chatbots that can pretend to be your dead grandma. Yet, somehow, the only thing they’re consistently brilliant at is making middle-aged men in Silicon Valley sound inspired. It’s as if they’ve just discovered religion. And the grifters? Oh, they’re loving it. They’re out here like medieval pardon-sellers. They are flogging indulgences in the form of prompt engineering courses and $997 “agentic workflow masterclasses.” These are sold to people. These people still can’t get their Outlook calendar to stop inviting them to meetings in 1973.

Here is a fresh list of the arguably twelve most egregious AI charlatans, rogues and professional mystics… Beware, they are currently doing the rounds.

Names are tweaked slightly so their lawyers don’t have another reason to email me at 3 a.m.)… all of them united by one extraordinary talent: the ability to look you straight in the eye. They tell you the future is inevitable. Then they quietly cash the cheque before the future actually arrives.

It’s like watching a particularly posh cult. The sacrament is venture capital. The only sin is asking for a working prototype.

Anyway. If you’re ready to meet the lads, they’ve turned hype into a lifestyle. They’ve made “trust me bro” into a business model. They still manage to get booked on podcasts. This happens even after their last three predictions landed somewhere between “optimistic fiction” and “active misinformation”. Then pull up a chair.

Because this lot? They’re not building the future.

They’re just very good at selling tickets to watch it being built.

And we’re all in the cheap seats.

(Names playfully tweaked to spare the perpetually lawsuit-happy. All descriptions brutally honest, straight from the trenches of goodstrat.com.)

1. Elton Mars Tuskerjee
   Deadline-dodger supreme. Promises AGI “next year” annually, converts shareholder billions into personal meme-rocket propellant, delivery ratio ≈ zero.
2. Sammy Altright-person
   Scaling-law messiah who convinced the planet that bigger models = superintelligence + immortality Real soon™. Master of trillion-dollar compute farms and periodic safety-team restructurings.
3. Andrej Karpathay-Tatyboy
   Ex-OpenAI star turned solo guru, selling the dream of reasoning agents that will “just work”… in a decade or so. Charismatic TED-style hope peddler for hallucinating autonomous systems.
4. Mark Mucker Suckerface
   Architect of the planet’s largest private surveillance empire, rebranded as “Meta AI.” Pivoted from privacy scandals to AI companions that “care” while monetising every heartbeat.
5. Balaji Onion Baji Sriniwhatsnext
   Professional civilisational-collapse forecaster. Predicts the end every 18 months, then sells $1M “network state” retreats and doomsday prep literature. AI hype as apocalyptic branding.
6. Bernardino Marvellous
   The eternal “AI thought leader” recycling the exact same “Top 10 AI Trends for [Current Year]” carousel every January since 2017. Charges premium fees to regurgitate Reddit threads from six months prior.
7. Peter “Peter” Thielberg
   Vampire philosopher funding longevity while shorting civilisation. Lectures on stagnation, accelerates collapse, wants to live forever in the chaos he helps engineer.
8. Brain Nodo Armwhitening
   Chip emperor who convinced markets his company was worth more than entire countries on pure AI-demand hype. Cashes out options quietly while everyone else rides the volatility rollercoaster.
9. Demis Haribo Hasslebro
   The polite British gentleman who keeps promising “safe AGI is coming soon” while quietly scaling models that make previous safety concerns look quaint. Master of the reassuring press release.
10. Yann Mann LeCunt
    Godfather of deep learning turned permanent contrarian. Insists LLMs are basically dead ends while simultaneously running one of the biggest labs pushing them further. The grift: eternal skepticism + massive funding.
11. Andrew Guyen Nguyen Gong
    The Coursera king who has been teaching “AI is the new electricity” for fifteen straight years. Now sells enterprise AI transformation courses that mostly explain why your company still can’t get basic data hygiene right.
12. Fei-Fei Visionaire Hevriwair
    The “mother of computer vision” who pivoted to selling the dream of ethical, human-centred AI while quietly consulting for the same defence contractors everyone else pretends to hate. The classic academic-to-corporate glow-up grift.

These twelve luminaries share one superpower: turning pattern-matching hype into personal fortunes while sounding profound on podcasts.

The antidote? Ignore the personality cult. Follow shipped code, audited results, and people who admit when they’re wrong.

(From goodstrat.com — where we still call hype what it is.)

Many thanks for reading.

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