verb · first recorded 2026 · status: emerging
IQmog
1.To dominate on raw intelligence what you lose on polish. From Sam Altman's claim that OpenAI still gets looksmaxxed on frontend but IQmogs hard now: the UI is uglier, the model is smarter, checkmate.
Their app looks like a tax form and their model tops every eval. Getting IQmogged by a tax form is a new feeling.
01Origin
"Mog" comes from AMOG ("alpha male of group") by way of the looksmaxxing forums: to mog someone is to outclass them so visibly it is humiliating for everyone present. IQmog moves the contest from jawlines to benchmarks, which is the only arena San Francisco ever wanted to compete in anyway.
The coinage is Sam Altman's April 2026 post: "we still get looksmaxxed on frontend a little but we IQmog hard now." The grammar was immediately contested: TBPN's Tyler Cosgrove pointed out that -maxx is self-improvement and -mog is comparison, so the correct form would have been "looksmogged." The press ran "Sam Altman, your millennial is showing." Altman responded three days later by posting that a colleague was "mogmogging," a construction with no known meaning, and moved on. The term stuck anyway; in SF, being corrected on suffix grammar while running the largest AI company on earth is itself a kind of mog.
In the field it is the all-purpose defense of every ugly-but-smart product. It pairs with uggmaxxing as the corporate version of the same trade (delete the polish, keep the power), and stands opposite taste is the moat: if taste is the moat, the IQmogger is the one swimming across it, benchmarks held above the water.
02Notable sightings
03Spread the ism
Every entry ships as a card. Download it, post it, cite your sources.