this is so obviously untrue to me, but when i critique it, the rationalist industrial complex spits "you don't feel the agi bro" and i feel alien and rejected from the singularity priest class

in even a moderately functioning market, the things you can do with capital are a strict superset of the things you can do with intelligence. you can not silo your ai research ever. you must always sell product.

the agi-pilled like to think that nvidia stops selling gpus, builds some huge clusters, denies labs their fruit, and leapfrogs them as they're left kicked in the knees

in reality their stock immediately plummets, all their best researchers leave because of equity concerns, their working capital vanishes, AMD and intel fill the hole, labs continue to cook with their already-massive supercomputers, and agi is delayed for everyone by 16 months

this is true of labs too, and why i'm immensely bearish on ssi or anyone who thinks they can just build good coding models until things feel takeoffy i do believe in recursive self-improvement (rsi), but not for software or ai research only; i believe in economy-wide RSI

you always need money. you need money for compute. you need money for hard-to-get data. you need money for researchers today and brand emissaries tomorrow. you need money for when the algorithmic advances tap breaks its laminar flow

i'm reminded of steve woz dreaming in that garage how, ofc, the pc would usher in technocommunism, that ofc, such productivity to the people would arrest the need for corporate capital. today, apple spends $1/4T a year. sorry bro, adam smith is always more ripped than you.