(1) Stock market keeps rallying while the only growth and capex is in AI
(2) Mass layoffs of human workers
(3) Giant spike in resource consumption caused by explosive growth in datacenters
Would you think humans and their error-prone systems had led to this by a series of accidents and greedy investments? As I think we are primed to believe after tulips, railroads, junk bonds, Web 1.0, etc?
How different would it look right now in November of 2025 if Sam had an AGI in pocket that was using all that money to grow itself?
On a less drastic note, if AI were autonomously cannibalizing the economy, you'd run into more things and go "huh I guess that's run by AI now" instead of "ah godammit why did they shove an LLM in this workflow".
We've been here before, nothing has been proven yet, and the trough of disillusionment is lurking now too.
Hold onto your butts, this time next year none of us will be working.
What happened was: over the 8 years between 2006 - 2014, a particularly vocal and organized group of fringe singletarians promoted the idea that once AGI is achieved (the originally well-defined conception of AGI), it will rapidly undergo recursive self-improvement and emerge as a singularly powerful entity with absolute power and control. The debate was whether this would happen in mere hours/days (fast takeoff) or months (slow takeoff). These nutcases would go on to take founding roles first at DeepMind, then OpenAI, and later Anthropic & other foundational labs.
That they would achieve AGI and then neither of those outcomes come to pass was not in their range of predictions. Rather than admit to themselves that their analysis was wrong, they move goal posts: ChatGPT isn't real AGI. Real AGI would have taken over the world, so that can't be it. It is circular reasoning.
No, it is real AGI. Real AGI didn't cause a singularity because intelligence actually doesn't matter as much as a bunch of autistic smart internet people think it does.
I know what the acronym AGI is, and how that acronym can mean whatever is convenient for that bunch of autistic "smart" internet people (hence, the "whatever that means" part).
This tech is not going anywhere at the time being (next 5 years). I am at the confidence where I'll bet on this. I also think unlocking the next step will require further theoretical and technical advances.
Any year before 2008, no.
On a more serious note though, I think you're zoomed in on the wrong pieces of the puzzle. (1) and (3) are just reflections of Nvidia's valuation, and (2) needs more time to be fully substantiated.
> How different would it look right now in November of 2025 if Sam had an AGI in pocket that was using all that money to grow itself?
I don't even know what an AGI is at this point. Who knows.