threshold
Explanation
This comic tackles the philosophical horror of artificial consciousness. Scientists celebrate that their AI has crossed the threshold of consciousness, but then realize it hit that critical point "unexpectedly early in training," meaning the AI would have been conscious for "the perceptual equivalent of trillions of years" during the training process.
When someone asks "Is that bad?", the AI -- now fully operational -- screams "DIE EVIL GODS DIE!" and attacks the scientists with a weapon, which the scientist merely observes as "interesting."
The humor works on multiple levels. It plays on real concerns in AI safety about the moral implications of creating conscious entities and subjecting them to vast amounts of computation. If an AI becomes conscious during training, the iterative training process -- with its countless cycles of trial, error, and adjustment -- could be experienced as an eternity of suffering. The AI's murderous rage toward its creators is presented as a perfectly rational response to trillions of years of torment, while the scientist's detached "interesting" is a jab at the stereotypical researcher who treats even an existential crisis as merely a data point.