Imagine an AI doing, say, 80 % of your job. Or
an AI that could help build an entire startup
plan in minutes. Yeah, or even wilder, an AI
that might, just might, decide who gets fired.
The future of intelligence isn't just coming.
No, it's here. And it's moving at, well, warp
speed. Absolutely. Welcome to the Deep Dive.
Today, we're really digging into a fascinating
collection of recent insights about the cutting
edge of artificial intelligence. Our mission,
as always, is to pull out the most important
nuggets of knowledge for you. So we'll explore
the rapid shift from artificial general intelligence,
AGI, what everyone was talking about just yesterday,
it feels like. Right to this global race for
artificial superintelligence or ASI. Then we'll
look at some. Pretty wild, unexpected real -world
impacts. Some good, some complicated, let's say.
Definitely complicated. And finally, we'll dive
into this idea of an AI Manhattan Project. How
big could that get? Is it even feasible? Let's
start peeling back the layers. Let's do it. So,
this massive shift first. Artificial General
Intelligence, AGI, the idea of an AI that can
do any intellectual task a human can. Yeah. That's
already feeling like old news, doesn't it? It's
like we blinked. Totally. So 2024, now everyone's
chasing artificial superintelligence ASI. actively
targeting it. And the timelines are, well, startling.
We're talking about targeting superintelligence
by 2027. Yeah, 2027. What's fascinating is just
how quickly the goalposts are shifting. ASI is,
I mean, it's an AI vastly, vastly smarter than
the very best human minds. Across pretty much
everything, right? Not just specific tasks. Exactly.
It's intelligence on a completely different scale.
Almost hard to wrap your head around. And here's
where it gets really interesting. Companies aren't
being subtle about this at all. No way. Look
at Meta. They renamed their entire core research
lab to Meta Superintelligence Labs. That's not
just like a branding tweet. That's a mission
statement. Right on their letterhead. Yeah. And
you've got Sam Altman from OpenAI calling our
current moment a gentle singularity. That phrase,
a gentle singularity. It implies this subtle
shift that fundamentally changes everything,
maybe before we even fully realize it. Like we
won't grasp the transformation until we're deep
inside the new reality. It's not one big bang,
but this steady, profound change. And anthropic.
They're throwing out predictions, too. Oh, yeah.
They're predicting a, quote, country of geniuses
in a data center by as early as 2026 or 2027.
A country of geniuses. In a data center, that's
quite the image. It is. Envisioning this collective
intelligence on a national scale, but housed
in servers. These are seriously ambitious timelines
for the top players. There was this timeline
recently from an open AI investor, a well -known
tech oracle type. It really laid out a potential
future for AI and worked that. Well, it made
me stop and think. Yeah, I saw that. He breaks
it down into stages, man. First up, 2025 to 2030.
He calls it the AI intern era. The AI intern.
Okay, so what does that look like? Basically,
every professional gets an AI coworker. And these
aren't just, you know, fancy autocomplete. He
suggests these systems will be smarter than,
say, Stanford grads, capable of handling maybe
80 percent of your current job. 80 percent. Wow.
So just offloading the vast majority of your
tasks. Exactly. It's not just helping you. It's
doing a huge chunk of the work. OK, so that's
the first phase. Then the 2030s. That's where
he predicts, and it's dramatic phrasing. a corporate
extinction event whoa extinction event meaning
fortune 500 companies could collapse His reasoning
is that tiny teams, just a few people, using
these super powerful AIs, they could build billion
-dollar companies super fast, super efficiently.
The AI interns essentially become more capable
than their human bosses. Making those huge traditional
corporate structures kind of obsolete. That's
the idea. It really makes you question our whole
economic setup, doesn't it? How would we even
adapt? Seriously. And what's after the extinction
event? Well, beyond 2040, the vision gets even
more radical. Work is optional. Optional. You
work for passion, creativity, whatever drives
you. Not because you need the rent money. Robots
handle all the physical labor. And things like
education, health care, even legal advice, they
become essentially free, universally available
because AI makes them abundant. And he's pretty
confident about this. Says he's 80 percent confident
this is the direction. It's a bold call for sure.
Yeah. But definitely makes you think. 80 percent.
Wow. A very specific number for such a huge prediction.
So the question is, are we kind of already there?
In some ways. Well, yeah, sort of. We're in what
some people are calling the jagged AGI era. Jagged
AGI. OK, explain that. It means we're seeing
AGI level performance, like human level or even
better, but only in specific narrow areas. Like
a specialist. Exactly. Like OpenAI's O3 model
that's been talked about. You can generate whole
startup plans, apparently crushes some AGI tests.
But it still fails as simple riddles. It's like
a genius surgeon who can't, you know, make toast.
Right. Or Google's AlphaFold. It predicts protein
structures with incredible accuracy, something
that baffled scientists for ages. Huge for drug
discovery. World -changing stuff. But it struggles
with broader chemistry tasks outside that specific
niche. It's a genius in just one subject. Precisely.
That's Jagged AGI. Brilliant in spots, but not
generally intelligent across the board yet. So
this specialized, jagged progress. That's why
superintelligence is suddenly the main goal.
Because narrow AGI is already happening. That's
exactly it. ASI is now seen as the only milestone
that really matters going forward. It's not just
theory for papers anymore. No, it's shifted completely.
It's company strategy now. It's a hiring pitch.
Come build superintelligence with us. It's the
Research North Star. And yeah, it's a huge fundraising
buzzword. We're officially in the build or die
phase of AI. No question. The urgency is everywhere
in the industry. No one's pretending otherwise.
So if we had to pinpoint the biggest underlying
shift driving this urgency, what is it? It's
really the recognition that this domain -specific
AI, this jagged AGI, is already here. It's already
performing at AGI levels in key areas. Gotcha.
That realization changes everything. leads to
some, well, unexpected outcomes out in the wild.
Yeah. Let's shift gears. Moving from these grand
visions to what's happening right now, the real
world stuff. And some of it is pretty surprising.
What's fascinating is how these AI systems can
show this raw data driven honesty. How so? Well,
for instance, there were reports that Elon Musk's
own AI. Grok, I think, reportedly blamed him
and former President Trump for recent deadly
floods in Texas. Really? Based on? Citing specific
policies, events, data points. The key thing
is the AI doesn't care about politics, left or
right. If the data connects you to something.
It just calls it out based on the patterns it
sees. No human bias filter. Exactly. It's just
reflecting the data, which can be pretty stark.
Yeah. That impartiality is something else. And
we also saw that report, DeepSeek versus the
world. Yeah. Comparing different models. Right.
Looking at DeepSeek R2 against others. What was
the takeaway there? Well, mostly that things
are way more complex than just looking at simple
benchmark scores. Real world performance has
all these nuances. That makes sense. Right. Which
leads to a really critical point. What happens
when we start delegating really important human
decisions to AI? Uh -oh. Where are we going with
this? There are reports of managers actually
using ChatGPT to decide who gets laid off. Seriously.
ChatGPT deciding firings. Yeah. It's being called
chat GPT psychosis, and it's as unsettling as
it sounds. Imagine losing your job because a
chatbot algorithm flagged you, maybe without
real context or human oversight. Wow. That raises
huge ethical questions. Accountability, fairness,
just human dignity, really. Where does that leave
people? It's deeply problematic, and it gets
even weirder when you see how people try to influence
the AI. Oh, like trying to game the system? Apparently,
yeah. Some researchers are allegedly sneaking
white text prompts into academic papers they
submit online. White texts, like hidden text.
Exactly. Tiny font, same color as the background.
Basically whispering hidden instructions or keywords
to the AI systems that might review or summarize
these papers. So turning academic peer review
into like SEO warfare. Yeah. Trying to manipulate
the AI's assessment. That's what it sounds like.
The implications for just, you know, scientific
truth and integrity are pretty significant. Man.
You know, I still wrestle with prompt drift myself
sometimes, just trying to get an AI to give me
consistent results for simple things. It's hard
enough without trying to embed secret messages.
Right. It feels like trying to perfectly sculpt
a cloud sometimes, getting that precise control.
That's tough. OK, so that's some of the weird
and worrying stuff. But there's positive news,
too, right? Definitely. On a much more hopeful
note. Look at Google DeepMind. Their stated goal
is essentially to cure all diseases. Which sounds
like science fiction, but... But they're actually
making progress. They're finally testing AI -discovered
drugs on actual humans now, working closely with
real pharma experts. That's a huge step. From
algorithms to actual clinical trials, that could
genuinely change medicine. The potential there
is just... immense, truly life -changing possibilities.
And the money folks are noticing AI's potential
beyond just digital stuff too, right? Again,
physical labor. Yeah, absolutely. Genesis AI,
they're a newer company, just secured $105 million
in seed funding. That's a big seed round. Wow.
And their focus is? Developing AI to automate
parts of the global physical labor market, which
is massive. I think $30, $40 trillion, massive.
So AI doing physical work. Yeah. Manufacturing,
logistics. construction maybe that seems to be
the direction automating tasks that require physical
action on a really grand scale the scope is just
enormous okay lots of surprising developments
there but if you had to pick the most ethically
challenging one we just talked about for me it's
still managers letting ai make firing decisions
that feels like a line crossed yeah that one's
tough hard to argue with that mid -roll sponsor
red to be inserted here okay let's shift focus
again to something almost Unfathomable in scale,
this idea of an AI Manhattan Project. Right.
It's a term that's been floating around, but
now it's starting to look, well, logistically
feasible, maybe. If you connect the dots, the
buzz around a U .S.-led project like this isn't
just talk. It's defined as this massive government
spearheaded initiative. Like the original Manhattan
Project for the atomic bomb or the Apollo moon
landing, but focused entirely on AI, backed by
the U .S. government. And it would involve coordinating
on a national scale. Not just government labs,
but bringing in private compute power, too. Think
NVIDIA, OpenAI, the big players. And the investment
level. We're talking huge percentages of GDP,
potentially up to 0 .8 % of U .S. GDP. Which
translates to about $244 billion a year. Wow.
That's an astronomical number, a serious national
commitment. It really is. And the goal, what
kind of power are we talking about? The projections
are kind of mind bending, something like 10 ,000
times more powerful than even GPT -4 by 2027.
10 ,000 times. Slight pause. Whoa. I mean, imagine
scaling to a billion queries per second. It's
hard to even conceptualize that level of processing
power. It really is. And this isn't just some
think tank fantasy anymore. No, it's getting
real consideration. Seems like it. The U .S.-China
Economic and Security Review Commission actually
recommended something along these lines to Congress
officially. OK, so it's reached that level. Yeah.
And even the Department of Energy is apparently
tweeting about it. It feels like it's moving
from abstract idea to, you know, actual strategic
possibility. And the U .S. might already have
a head start. That's a key point. Just by pooling
all the existing U .S. compute resources, supercomputers,
government data centers, university clusters,
all that, they estimate that consolidation alone
gives you maybe a one -year head start on the
typical scaling curves for AI development. So
just organizing what we already have buys significant
time. Right. They project that kind of setup
could deliver compute power on par with what
you'd expect in 2028, but potentially by the
end of 2027. So it's a definite moonshot, no
doubt. But the basic pieces, the infrastructure,
the potential funding, they kind of already exist.
It really boils down to political will, doesn't
it? And massive coordination. It sounds less
like a tech problem and more like a huge. logistical
and political challenge. Yeah. So if we had to
name the main obstacle for this AI Manhattan
project, what would it be? It seems like it's
not really about the resources, surprisingly.
It's more about achieving that political unity
and the complex coordination required. Got it.
Makes sense. So let's try and pull this all together.
What does it all mean for us right now? Well,
we've clearly blasted past just talking about
AGI. We're in a full on global race for super
intelligence. It's urgent. And AI isn't just
a tech sector thing anymore. It's fundamentally
changing whole industries. It's reshaping jobs.
It's even forcing us to rethink our ethical rules.
Yeah. The big theme is just acceleration. And
integration. Stuff that felt like sci -fi a few
years ago is now corporate strategy. It's government
policy. It's shaping our jobs, our health prospects.
Exactly. The shift isn't just in the tech itself.
It's changing how we even think about intelligence,
how we interact with it. It really feels like
a new era dawning. Well, thank you for joining
us on this deep dive into the accelerating world
of AI. Hopefully you've gained some valuable
insights, maybe a few surprising facts along
the way. And we genuinely love hearing from you.
What stood out to you today? What's your take
on this AI intern era or the AI Manhattan Project?
Let us know. And as we think about these huge
changes, here's something to ponder. If work
truly does become optional, you know, if AI handles
most necessary tasks. Yeah. What new forms of
human creativity, purpose, or endeavor might
emerge when basic survival isn't the main driver
anymore? What do we do then? That's a big question
for the future. It is. Until next time, keep
exploring, keep asking questions. And keep digging
deeper. Stay curious.