The Sam Altman stans are having a meltdown. This sounds familiar.

• AI superfans and influencers are speculating about OpenAI's new feature, rumored to be called Strawberry or Q*.
• Sam Altman has engaged with some of these influencers and has stoked the rumors with his own posts.
• Now they're having a classic fandom meltdown.

There's nothing a fandom loves more than arguing online and creating elaborate, speculative lore based on tiny clues knit together by pseudonymous influencer accounts dedicated to following the minutia of their idols. This is how, for example, rumors started that Beyoncé was going to perform at the DNC or that Harry Styles and One Direction bandmate Liam Payne were in a secret relationship together for years.

AI enthusiasts and insiders now have their own version of this. New York Magazine's John Herrman just wrote about how there's a bit of a meltdown currently happening in the AI fandom.

This is a group that is excited and positive about AI and eager for its advancement to AGI. This is different from the AI doomers, who fear that AGI will lead to humanity's decimation. These AI stans are excited for OpenAI's next release. They're palpably excited about a rumored new OpenAI project with the codename "Strawberry" and use the strawberry emoji frequently. When Sam Altman posted a photo of strawberries growing in his garden, they flipped out. There's also excitement about another project (or former codename for Strawberry, since it's all rumors) called Q*.

An influencer whose X avatar is Joaquin Pheonix in "Her" and has strawberry emojis in his X name recently caused a big stir in this world. They predicted a release date for Strawberry, and played up the idea that they might be an OpenAI insider, which was eventually revealed to be totally untrue.

Meanwhile, some even wilder drama just happened where another AI influencer named Lily Ashwood came onto an X Space (you know the online drama is going to be hard to follow when a lot of it involves things that went down in an X Space). Ashwood had a stilted speaking affect, and people speculated that she wasn't a real human at all but some new AI voice technology. Ashwood has since posted a video of herself to dispel the rumor, and frankly, whether someone is an AI-generated chatbot is none of my business.

To recap: what we have here is a group of highly passionate and maybe slightly paranoid people who believe that pseudonymous online accounts are feeding them drips of information from inside powerful institutions. There's clues and allusions made of codewords and insider lingo and symbols. And sometimes they get some light engagement on X from the Big Boss himself, just enough to fuel the true believers. Oh, and there's something important to all of this called Q*. Does any of this sound familiar?

What fascinates me about this is not the release date of OpenAI's new product or what it will do (I mean, I'm interested in that, too!). But even if AGI never happens, this shows AI has reached a new height: online fandom meltdown.