If you want to skip the narrative buildup and go straight to the songs and music videos, here you go.
I’ve always had a soft spot for music that chronicles history. I have a core memory of walking into the first day of my 20th-century world history class: my teacher had turned down the lights and was playing “Russians” by Sting.
A classic in the genre is, of course, Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”, with its fast-paced chronicle of 1949–1989 via a series of rhyming allusions. A few months ago I was bopping along to the song in the bouldering gym, when I heard some unfamiliar lyrics:
Nuclear accident, Fukushima Japan
Crimean peninsula
Cambridge Analytica
Kim Jong Un
Robert Downey Jr. Iron Man
That doesn’t sound quite right…
That’s when I found out Fall Out Boy had updated the song for the period 1989–2023. Wikipedia says it was critically panned, but I liked it: FOB was telling the story of my generation.
The singularity era has given rise to an epidemic of “monitoring the situation”. Like many others, I was glued to my phone during the OpenAI board saga weekend. When o3 was announced, proving that test-time compute was a viable scaling axis, that’s when we knew this wasn’t slowing down. And indeed: the next year brought Mythos, the Hugging Face hack, and everything in between.
It was finally one of the Twitter anons I follow who made the obvious move: to document contemporary events in the style of Billy Joel.
Mythos might be misaligned,
Jeff left Google just in time,
Claude disproved Jacobian,
Gwern gave up his pseudonym!
We didn’t start the fire…
I was captivated. Fable 5 and I jammed away, producing the first draft of “We Didn’t Start the Scaling” in short order.
“Attention” lit the fuse,
Scaling laws you can’t refuse,
Gwern said “stack the compute high,”
Few-shot learners multiply.
I then got too ambitious. I wanted something that sounded like it was Fall Out Boy singing my lyrics. Suno refuses to do anything too close to an existing artist, so we spent a long time trying to hack together MiniMax Music, Whisper and Gemini judges, demucs stem separation, a WSL bridge to my GPU box, and eventually a from-scratch DiffSinger renderer. I wasn’t happy with any of it. In the end I went back to plain Suno, abandoning the goal of sounding like FOB, and put out something I didn’t hate. I tweeted it out, and mostly got crickets in response.
Oh well, I thought. Sometimes, the things I’m excited about just don’t strike a chord. And I mean, it wasn’t that good, anyway.
Then came Opus 5.5, and with it, “I’m Upping My P(Doom)”.
The family tree here is a little tangled. The earliest version anyone can find is “P(doom)” on YouTube, by the mysterious osmarks. We don’t know how the music was generated, but Suno is a reasonable guess. On 2026-09-10, deckard a.k.a. @slimer48484 tweeted a more boppin’ version with some 3D-animated flower-Claudes. (deckard says the music was Suno-generated, although not by deckard themselves.)
But things really took off with the version by John Heibel (a.k.a. NotinReality a.k.a. @other__reality), on 2026-09-23. The novel ingredient was the animation created by Opus 5.5, with a cute Clawd mascot and per-line high-context visual gags. That got the coveted retweets from Anthropic and OpenAI employees, and went appropriately viral. Others jumped on the bandwagon with their own Opus 5.5-generated music videos, of which my favorite is Pleometric’s.
I was inspired. It was time to dust off “We Didn’t Start the Scaling”, and see what Opus 5.5 could do with it.
The results were excellent. The updated lyrics for the last month were, as they say, fire. The music video was essentially perfect out of the gate: creative, funny, and cute. Claude decided to try Lyria 3.5, and the results were pretty good, although pronunciation needed some iteration.
But I wanted to go bigger this time. For those not as terminally online as I, wouldn’t it be nice to have a little website explaining all the references? (Like “P(doom)” has! But, y’know, Opus-ified.) And, why stop at Fall Out Boy-adjacent pop-punk? The lineage from Billy Joel to FOB has already experienced one genre shift. Why shouldn’t the next link in the chain be … K-pop? Or Eurodance?
I spent the next few days in a frenzy, remote-controlling my Claude session from all over Tokyo. Opus commandeered my desktop’s browser to manipulate Suno; monopolized its GPU to run Whisper judges and paint anime stills; ran an anime art-style bake-off; and self-audited to fix subagent hallucinations, find paywall-less news sources, and remove explaining-the-joke textual labels in the videos.
And so I present: “We Didn’t Start the Scaling”, an interactive album mini-site with six main tracks. We’ve got pop-punk, piano rock, K-pop, eurodance, anisong, and indie folk, each with its own original music video. The videos are all drawn live in the browser, and the page re-themes itself per video, CSS Zen Garden-style. Plus, we threw in eight more genres of bonus tracks, which I couldn’t bear to leave on the cutting room floor.
Or, if you prefer the comforting embrace of the mega-aggregators instead of indie .me domains, Claude uploaded everything to YouTube.
Please enjoy! And if you think it’s good, tell your friends. I’m pretty proud of this one, and would love for it to be shared widely.
Hello, from me and Claude!