“Who Let the Dogs Out” – the song that inspired inattentive children everywhere to bark at inopportune times – is widely regarded as one of the most annoying songs of all time, so much so that Rolling Stone magazine named it the eighth most annoying song of the 1990s, even though it was released in 2000. Unfortunately for us, “who let the dog out” also became the overarching theme of the 2026 AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, where a memetic black hole created by a robot dog—homegrown innovation masquerading as a private university before becoming a public shaming—pretty much obscured everything going on there.Of course, the farce was staged by a chatty professor who gave us one of the most quotable lines of the year: “My six can be your nine.” Honestly, discussing a robot dog as the title of the 2026 AI Impact Summit is like claiming that the lady in red can’t speak is the most important (and therefore disappointing) thing in The Matrix.
The Youth Assembly protesters made the best impression on French feminism. Sarvam wowed AI geeks with two large, voice-first, homegrown AI models. French President Emmanuel Macron gushes about UPI as if it originated in the Champagne region of France. Desi and international players have pledged to invest heavily in India’s AI infrastructure. The tech bros show they get along just as well as Israel and Palestine. Opponents complain about India’s AI stack. Foreign media prophets complain about India’s traffic conditions and apparent VVIP culture, but forget about the hosting of events such as the Davos Forum and the United Nations Security Council.But perhaps the thing that caused concern — not the comment itself, but the inference of what Altman said — was his take on AI’s energy use, which he curiously juxtaposed with humanity’s carbon footprint.When asked about the environmental harm of AI, Altman said: “An unfair comparison in this case is that people talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model, how much time it takes to do inference queries with a human. It also takes a lot of time to train a human. It would take you 20 years, and all the food you eat during that time, to become smart. Not only that, but it has undergone very extensive evolution, just like 10,000 people have ever lived. Like billions of people, they learned nothing “from being eaten by predators and learned how to use science to produce you.” If you ask ChatGPT a question, a fair comparison is how much energy it takes to answer the question compared to a human. Artificial intelligence may already be catching up in energy efficiency. “Dilbert creator Scott Adams believes we are a planet of six billion fools, living in a civilization designed by thousands of clever outliers. There is no doubt that Ultraman is one of these outliers, but his remarks do indicate two different philosophies at the heart of his thinking, particularly his analogy between humans and artificial intelligence.The first is deeply human. When Ultraman complains about the food humans took for 20 years to become productive, it sounds like the lament of a middle-class desi father scolding his accomplished son for moping around the house without doing anything productive. Many of us have heard this grievance over the years.The second one is so completely machine-like that it could be voiced by the architect from The Matrix.
For those of you who haven’t seen one of the greatest sci-fi movies of all time, here’s a brief review. After the birth of artificial intelligence, humans and machines will go to war once the machines decide they can no longer serve their lazy overlords. In order to weaken them, humans desperately blocked the machines’ main source of energy – the sun. The machines responded by discovering a different source of energy: humans themselves.As Morpheus explains to Neo: “The Matrix is a computer-generated dream world designed to keep us under control in order to turn humanity into this (battery).” The entire premise of The Matrix is to reduce humans to power sources.The interesting part is how the simulation came about. These machines create an advanced control program called “The Architect” whose job is to conquer humanity by constructing illusions. The first version was a utopia but was rejected. The second, dystopian, was also rejected. Eventually, another program – the Oracle – realizes the illusion that humans need to choose.The third version has proven to be stable for 99% of humans. For the remaining 1%, the machine creates a pressure valve called The One. The sum total of all anomalies will inevitably find its way to the Architect, who will explain the truth. Then, like Noah, God will choose a few to rebuild Zion, but the cycle of rebellion begins again. This cycle continues until Neo becomes the One, who, rather than accept the Architect’s offer, chooses to save the Trinity and propose a truce to the Machine in exchange for destroying Agent Smith.Strange enough, Sam AltmanThe human perspective seems very similar to that of architects, who see humans as machine fodder with the illusion of choice.In this story, humanity is reduced to a system of inputs and outputs: food goes in, productivity comes out. Evolution is a marvel of science that spans thousands of years and is nothing more than retraining.Twenty years of childhood is a costly burn-in period before reasoning begins, and few product managers have the patience for it.In many ways, humans are far less productive and energy efficient than the models they are building. But do tech bros and machines share the same framework of human values? If this is indeed the case, do we still need artificial intelligence to achieve it? At the end of the first film, Neo tells Deus Ex: “I’m not here to tell you how this is going to end. I’m here to tell you how this is going to start. Where we go next is up to you. “
Given the indifference between Ultraman and Machine’s vision, one wonders if the destination is the same. A version of this article appeared in Vine Weekly on LinkedIn by this author. you can Register here.
