Atomic Razor

Capturing Value

Gross Global Product is ~$100 trillion. How much of that could be captured by AI? 1% would be $1 trillion. Split that up between a few big firms, a few might get $100 billion.. $100 billion in revenue corresponds to a value of $800 billion or so (say 500 million to $1.2 trillion), so if you are a big tech company, you might hope to get your market cap to increase by 50-100% if you can capture a slice of that 1%. (Alphabet is ~$1.9 trillion). So, we can see why the big tech companies might want to make big bets on AI. Firstly, they are IT companies, so doing AI is a continuation of what they have been doing for years and, secondly, if they don't, they might get their lunch eaten. But a $1 trillion and we are nowhere near that in AI-related revenues yet.

Gemini Pro 2.5 tells me

While the direct market value of the software industry (companies primarily creating and selling software) likely accounts for roughly 0.6% to 1% of the Gross Global Product, this figure significantly underrepresents software's overall economic importance.

Software is a foundational layer and productivity driver for nearly every other industry. The broader IT sector represents closer to 5% of GGP, and the software-fueled digital economy constitutes a much larger share, highlighting software's pervasive and critical role in the modern global economy.  

So, we can do a sanity check. Our $1 trillion might represent the whole or more of the market value of the software industry, but alternatively 20% of the broader IT sector. Could AI capture that 20% in 5 years? Clearly I find AI very useful for helping with my IT and programming issues. If were programming 40 hours a week how much more productive would I be? But, of course, the kind of stuff I was doing, ad hoc Jupyter Notebooks, isn't what most programmers do.According to the Weasel, Innovyze has 2 million lines of code. That's hundreds of developer-years of effort over 30 years. Vibes coding might allow you to produce 20,000 lines of code in a weekend, but then you have to debug it. Having said that, it's not as hell isn't other people's code and the quality of code in the Innovyze I know from days there is variable. Of course, writing a water resource management system from scratch isn't something that many people are likely to want to do at this epoch. (API monitoring tools might be a different matter.) AI might be good for helping to get a demo up and running (and will be better at debugging its own code), but how much can it help with a large existing codebase? That's an interesting question Soon, you are going to be able to through the entire codebase into an AI. As Gemini told me

This large context window allows me to process and understand much larger amounts of information at once, like long documents, hours of video, or extensive codebases, and maintain coherence over lengthy conversations.

Most programmers are not l33t, but perhaps there just isn't enough juice in being a Stack Overflow replacement. I am going to use Gemini to help me write a MuZero-type deep reinforcement learning system to play Kurt Vonnegut's GHQ, so we will see how quickly we can  get a demo working. FMs have been very useful to me already, for instance, in my current consulting project, so there is definitely value there for me at the few tens of dollars a month level (what I pay for Gemini Pro). A billion people paying $300/year is $300 billion, but then most of the costs are going to be hidden from the end-user. Yr company is psaying your Office 365 subscription, so how much of that is going to going on AI in a couple of years? If you have one DIRW working 168 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, who knows what state your codebase is going to end up in soon enough?

The Ten Per Cent Solution

Yesterday we talked about Cathie Wood who apparently that we're "in the middle of the most magnificent period of truly disruptive innovation in history" and predicted real GDP growth could jump from 3% to potentially 7-10%.There must be something in the air because today I find Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, speaking at the 2025 annual meeting of Madrona, a Seattle-based VC company, saying

“My formula for when can we say AGI has arrived? When, say, the developed world is growing at 10%, which may have been the peak of the Industrial Revolution. That’s a good benchmark for me.”

We might say well, they would say that, wouldn't they? They are both trying to sell something, whether it is software licences or investment services. The notion that the world might suddenly leap in half a decade or so to rates of global rates of growth never before seen seems prima facie absurd, although, as I discussed in my previous article, a case can be made and it doesn't necessarily even have to involve TDMNT or humanoid robots. In the world of the DIRW, what would humans do? Go and get jobs in the caring professions? I mean when cellular rejuvenation and anti-dementia drugs kick in, even that's not going to be as much of a option.Everyone will be a middle manager and spend their time going to (virtual) meetings about (virtual) meetings? Or run artisanal whisky bars? I guess hobbyist stuff with a lot of free time would work very well for a lot of people, but is the trajectory of large capitalism in that direction? I am not sure how that works under kleptocratic kakistocracy/kakistocratic kleptocracy.

As I have said, there is a lot of low hanging fruit. You can built a lot of infrastructure not just in developing countries. Decarbonising the economy is a big project that will absorb a big slice GGP. In the US, to solve the housing crisis, you need to build tens of millions of housing units (the iron law of supply and demand). How do you that in Seattle? Flying cars might solve the commute problem (where would they land?) and you could build a huge new city in Ellensburg or somewhere, perhaps with a hyperloop link to Seattle. Improved tunneling technology would be amazing if Seattle could get a proper metro in a few years rather than decades. All of those superyachts and private spaceships will count towards GGP as will everyone having their own personal virtual physician and therapist.

Nadella is right that if we do get a economic boom that can be ascribed to AI, we could call that AGI because it would be clear that the world has been transformed by AI and so it would be fair to think of that AI has something qualitatively different to GOFAI. Of course, it already is qualitatively and quantitatively different to GOFAI. Nothing was solving undergrad physics questions a decade ago. Still, of course, I want to see the first bona fide AGI scientific breakthrough. Something like room temperature superconductors would be a good start because it would be a revolutionary technology and undeniably a growth driver. But there are other things. What about solving maths. Or at least solutions to the outstanding Hilbert problems

8. Problems of prime numbers (The "Riemann Hypothesis").

13. Impossibility of the solution of the general equation of 7th degree by means of functions of only two arguments.

16. Problem of the topology of algebraic curves and surfaces.

A DCoSG could also help with problems 1, 2, 5, 6,[a] 9, 11, 12, 15, and 22, which have solutions that have partial acceptance, but there exists some controversy as to whether they resolve the problems. There are many other unresolved problems in mathematics. The solution of any one of them would be extraordinary. I wonder if that will happen (soon; 2025? 2027? 2030? 2038?)? It wouldn't even necessarily be AGI, but it would be amazing.

 

Abundance

Cathie Wood , apparently a well-known investor, apparently said recently, presumably at the recent Abundance 2025 Summit, that we're "in the middle of the most magnificent period of truly disruptive innovation in history" and predicted real GDP growth could jump from 3% to potentially 7-10%. Wow! Slow down there! But what would that be like? There's a lot of low hanging fruit, of course, not just in developing countries, but obviously that's difficult to unlock in sclerotic neoliberal states for a variety of reasons. But here we are talking about the data centre of (super)geniuses and what that leads to. A(G)I doesn't displace jobs, it displaces roles, but displace enough roles and you start displacing jobs and Leopold Aschenbrenner's drop-in remote worker is displacing jobs, so that could be massively disruptive to the economy if you are suddenly displacing a lot of people and the DIRWs are better than humans. That could drive a lot of growth by removing a lot of friction in all sorts of businesses.

We didn't have humanoid robots a decade ago, not ones you could buy for $10k, nor AI that was any good, but now we have both with lots of robotics startups and powerful AI and regular breakthroughs in AI for robotics, so it is hard to imagine that they are not going to a thing. Robots are perhaps where FMs were in 2020, but again those data centres of supergeniuses. Cheap, powerful robots could certainly have a disruptive impact on the economy and drive growth to historically high levels. A lot of growth revolves around building shit and that's hard in a lot of countries. I remember reading somewhere back in the mid-2000s that it would be better to build buildings with TDMNT because it would be slow, but that might not be true and the robots, humanoid and not, could help. To solve the housing crisis we have to build lots of new houses. There's plenty of land in the world and we really need to build lots of new cities. They did this in China after all. Flying cars solves the commute problem and you can expand Spokane to 10 million people.

The ultimate drivers are biotech and phystech, especially though not exclusively TDMNT. You can do lots of coll stuff without TDMNT, for instance, room temperature superconductors or fusion reactors or programmable matter or quantum computers or vat-grown meat or personalised medicine. But it's definitely easier to do cool stuff with TDNMT. We might never have our own personal nanofactories, but we can certainly imagine that most things will be grown in local facilities from air, dirt, sunlight and water. It would certainly disrupt global supply chains.

Of course, I believe the world will undergo profound change over the next decade. It's hard for me right now in March 2025 to really believe that that change won't be awful, the clash of geopolitical and technoeconomic forces seems much more likely to literally rend the world asunder, but it's all we've got. We've never been here before, but there might be some timelines that can survive the oncoming storm.

True North

"Canada, the True North, strong and free." So, I have finally managed to get to Canada. It's very metric, except when it isn't. Really freaky that distances and speeds are in kilometres(/hour). There definitely seems to be more British-type stuff in the shops, such as chocolate bars, and there are definitely lots of British accents to be heard in Whistler, both working in the businesses and in the street. I wonder what visas those workers are on. It feels practically like being back in London. Also the infrastructure seems better than in the US, but maybe that's just wishful thinking. Certainly it feels here like being in the future. 

"Come with us. It's going to a wild ride."

The first mention of AGI and the Singularity on this blog was on Monday, 9 February 2004, over 21 years ago. My interests haven't changed.

***

Two Essential Mailing Lists and Some Other Things

If you don't already subscribe to these lists, do so now.

SL4 mailing list

www.sl4.org/intro.html#join

and the AGI mailing list

agiri.org

There is significant overlap in both the membership of the lists and the topics discussed. The AGI l(Artificial General Intelligence) list focuses more on technical discussion of artificial intelligence research while the the SL4 (Shock Level 4) list concentrates more on topics relared to the Technological Singularity. As the two subjects are intimately related, it is best to read both lists. Both lists are moderated and posts are generally of a high quality. Ben Goertzel (www.goertzel.org) regularly posts. He's leader of the Novamente Project and is definitely not off his meds. He has an online book The Path to Posthumanity at

agiri.org/path/index.htm

Here's an interesting looking link to another online book about the Singularity by Bill Hibbard. Hibbard is an academic and has done a great deal of thinking on this topic

www.ssec.wisc.edu/~billh/gotterdammerung.html

***

The SL4 URL still exists though the last post to the mailing list was in 2012. Yudkowsky went on to many probably more lucrative ways of things monetising his angle. The AGIRI URL also still exists though, again, it doesn't look like it's been updated in years. Ben's website was updated in November 2024, possibly more recently. He is still active (the AGI-25 conference is in Iceland in August), of course, and might pop up on the AGI list now and then, although it's pretty moribund. The link to Bill Hibbard's book still exists. I wonder how it stacks up nearly a quarter of century in given what we are on the cusp of. It's interesting that all the sites are still there even if not been updated. The ideas are still out there and we got old without noticing and Singularitarians are the kinds of people obsessed by preserving the past as well as creating the future. As I said yesterday we can't really believe that we are here now and, of course, it feels real and unreal at the same time. As I said in our very first post on 6 February 2004, "Come with us. It's going to a wild ride." Today, I renew that invitation. The next 21 years are going to be an even wilder ride and I don't know if we are going to be get, but if not, we'll die trying.   

If you don't already subscribe to these lists, do so now.

SL4 mailing list

www.sl4.org/intro.html#join

and the AGI mailing list

agiri.org

There is significant overlap in both the membership of the lists and the topics discussed. The AGI l(Artificial General Intelligence) list focuses more on technical discussion of artificial intelligence research while the the SL4 (Shock Level 4) list concentrates more on topics relared to the Technological Singularity. As the two subjects are intimately related, it is best to read both lists. Both lists are moderated and posts are generally of a high quality. Ben Goertzel (www.goertzel.org) regularly posts. He's leader of the Novamente Project and is definitely not off his meds. He has an online book The Path to Posthumanity at

agiri.org/path/index.htm

Here's an interesting looking link to another online book about the Singularity by Bill Hibbard. Hibbard is an academic and has done a great deal of thinking on this topic

www.ssec.wisc.edu/~billh/gotterdammerung.html

***

The SL4 URL still exists though the last post to the mailing list was in 2012. Yudkowsky went on to many probably more lucrative ways of things monetising his angle. The AGIRI URL also still exists though, again, it doesn't look like it's been updated in years. Ben's website was updated in November 2024, possibly more recently. He is still active (the AGI-25 conference is in Iceland in August), of course, and might pop up on the AGI list now and then, although it's pretty moribund. The link to Bill Hibbard's book still exists. I wonder how it stacks up nearly a quarter of century in given what we are on the cusp of. It's interesting that all the sites are still there even if not been updated. The ideas are still out there and we got old without noticing and Singularitarians are the kinds of people obsessed by preserving the past as well as creating the future. As I said yesterday we can't really believe that we are here now and, of course, it feels real and unreal at the same time. As I said in our very first post on 6 February 2004, "Come with us. It's going to a wild ride." Today, I renew that invitation. The next 21 years are going to be an even wilder ride and I don't know if we are going to be get, but if not, we'll die trying.   

The Data Centre of Idiot Savant PhD-Level Biotech Researchers

So, we have the idea of the data centre of (super)geniuses. They have assimilated every scientific paper and textbook ever written, can reduce and analyse masses of data instantaneously, are brilliant at coming up with original theories, can develop and run complex simulations  and can direct and, in some cases, through machine and robotic interfaces, carry out experiments. So, we get, a few months to years, profound breakthroughs in every area of science from astronomy to zoology. We solve mathematics (yes, obviously,Gödel's Theorem means we can't run out of mathematics), cure most diseases, invent radical life extension technologies, unify quantum mechanics and general relativity, understand turbulence, gain new ways of understanding cybernetic systems that have profound implications across biochemistry, cell biology, condensed matter physics, cosmology, ecology, fluid mechanics, historiography, human geography, materials science, physiology, planetology and sociology, find room temperature superconductors and build fusion torchships. And, of course, perfect True Drexlerian Molecular Nanotechnology and the Personal Nanofactory.

Ah, yes, the PNF. A WMD in every home.

And all this is going to happen in 5-10 years from, say, 2027, so 2032 to 2037. Or perhaps even quicker. Once we have TDMNT, we don't have to worry about it taking years to build a fab or roll out new energy generation capacity. There will still be characteristic timescales for things to happen, especially with humans in the loop, but a lot of interesting stuff might be done in months. It will be a hell of a ride even if someone can cook up mirror life or a hafnium bomb in their garden shed. Humh... Perhaps those PNFs shouldn't be P.

The thing is we have been telling ourselves this story for decades. I was on a panel about this at the 1995 Worldcon in Glasgow. And 30 years later, we can't believe it anymore because it's something that's always going to be lurking out there a few decades away. Even if it's hard to deny that there's been some progress in AI over the last 30 years and even if we might wonder what another 30 years of progress in AI might bring. I'd only be 86, younger than my mum in 2055 after all. 

So the Amodei scenario, the Singularity itself, seems too much to be true. It's a powerful idea, but we don't believe it's going to actually happen. Do we? But here's the thing. Forget about the data centre of supergeniuses. FMs already know a lot more than they are telling about WMDs. Let's imagine that you work in a state WMD lab. Say in North Korea or Iran or Russia or Pakistan. You can take a powerful open weights reasoning system like DeepSeek R1 and finetune it with a lot of publically available and classified information on your preferred WMD. Let's say, for concreteness, bioweapons. You're in a bioweapons lab. You have a system you have trained to help you do bioweapons R&D. It seems far from implausible that such a system could help with developing novel bioweapons more quickly. And this is just a data centre of idiot savant PhD-level biotech researchers. They aren't superintelligent, they don't care about anything and they don't really know much outside their domain. But by late 2027, do we really think such systems couldn't exist? That they couldn't help cook up something nasty? That the something nasty couldn't - accidentally or deliberately - be introduced into the wider world. WE aren't talking grey goo here, just good old-fashioned viruses or bacteria or molds. Do we got think that this prospect is the greatest emergency in the world right now because given the situation we are in the chances of us being able to stop those bioweapons being developed is decreasing daily and the probability of a crisis in which they are deployed is increasing?

Which is why I am absolutely terrified right now and why, perhaps we need a Butlerian jihad.

The Triumphant Return of History

I remember, as I have said before, when I was a kid, probably in my mid-teens and reading books like The Science in Science Fiction (as David Brin said, there's at least one story idea on every spread in that book - now, there's a thought) and watching Horizon on AI, what the actual state of the art was, Because what we were being shown did seem that impressive, but then things must have moved on a bit since the books were writte or the programmes made. They must have some really good stuff in the research labs. Royal Philips after all in their adverts promised us that they were "Simply years ahead." "Come and see how close we are",their German rivals Grundig assured me in about 1982. Of course, we have all that stuff and far more now, except the holographic TV, which makes me want that more. Perhaps it will always be 20 years away,like AI and nuclear fusion. Of course, 20 years might be 4 years now.

It's not like there wasn't a lot of impressive progress in AI over the decades. The state of the art had moved on a lot from the early 1980s to the early 2010s when I read Russell and Norvig. But it was still mostly the very idea of AI. A decade and a bit on we have systems we could barely have credited then. It's hard to believe that AI or AGI or ASI is 20 years off now, but it's hard for to get our heads around what we have already much less what we are going to have in 20 years.  Of course, I don't mean 20 years. 20 years means infinity. We don't have to think about it. It was always 20 years. What we have now is just Clever Hans or memorising the internet or AI slop or a curio for academics. I mean perhaps the scaling laws will fail - GPT-4.5 should be GPT-5 - but it turns out Grok and Gemini 2 could solve the starship question and we can reinforcement learning and chain of thought and mixture of experts and even if we ran out of scale now it's not as though stuff couldn't be tweaked and there's plenty of room for a thousand philosophies to bloom and, oh, it's hard to believe the systems won't get any more powerful and useful by March 2045 than March 2025. I mean look back at March 2005 and we already have an actual usecase for FMs in coding if nothing else because there are a lot of programmers out there and most of them are not l33t. Believe me or look at Stackoverflow.

As Leonard Aschenbrenner opines in Situational Awareness (dated June 2024 so what does he think now and, no, I am not going on Twitter to look)

It is a delusion of those who have unconsciously internalized our brief respite from history that this will not summon more primordial forces. Like many scientists before us, the great minds of San Francisco hope that they can control the destiny of the demon they are birthing. Right now, they still can; for they are among the few with situational awareness, who understand what they are building. But in the next few years, the world will wake up. So too will the national security state. History will make a triumphant return.

Now, I have looked believed that history was going to make a triumphant return, that there was a WWI-level Black Swan lurking out there in the near future of the 2020s and it turns I was right. Except it's not a WWI-level one, it's a WWII level one. At least. Now, here's the thing. This is bad enough just with what we already have in March 2025. A hot war with China to knock out TSMC in Taiwan or the US pulling out of NATO and Europe having to step up to Russia alone. But their economy is only the size of Italy! Yes, but the Russians capacity to endure suffering is greater than than of the (Western) Europeans and the sheer scale of the socioeconomic impact on Europe of having to consciously decouple from the US is so mindboggling that I just don't see how it could be done. The US pulled our arses out of the fire in 1917 and 1941. Do we really believe in 2025 that Europe has anything approaching the state capacity to pull its own arse out of the fire. Yes, Russia is a paper tiger in some ways, but at least it has its own military technosphere not dependent on the US (China maybe). Russian aircraft might not be much use against F-16s or F-35s, but at least they control their own software. (Go the Eurofighter Typhoon! But it's 40 years old now. I know, I know.)  And a lot of things are cold consolidation if you personally are dead from a WMD. It's not like Russian rockets don't work (SS-20: 174 launches, 174 successes). And bricolage should not be underestimated. Or the entrenching tool.

The point is that, as I have long said, everyday it becomes easier to cook up something nasty in the molecular biology lab. We get nearer some disgruntled postdoc or the North Korea releasing something awful. And we aren't even talking grey goo. Just Gain of Function viruses. Or mirror life. The thing is that data centre of (super)geniuses might just be an AI very good at answering PhD-level science questions asked of it. That it might "assimilate" every scientific paper ever written is hardly a wonder. FMs already do in some sense. So, the notion that something might emerge out of all this doesn't need us to believe in the Singularity in some theological sense. It's just making it easier to make nasty things in a way that's hard to control through the traditional non-proliferation channels. Dying is easy. It's been going on on Earth for 4 billion years or more. There's likely to be an awaful lot of dying in the next half-decade.

The A(G|S)I Gap

I promised yesterday to write later about whether it even makes sense to talk of trying to maintain an A(G|S)I Gap with China. The US certainly has a moat when it comes to chips, but moat is critically dependent on Taiwan. China could just use more chips or less efficient ones to get the same amount of raw compute. Although there are a lot of master's and PhD students studying AI in China, most of the algorithmic breakthroughs are coming from the US, Canada and London because that's where the best researchers end up. But plenty of people are going back from the Western labs to China all the time, so if the West were serious about maintaining the moat they would only be allowing Westerners to work in frontier labs and frontier labs would be in SCIFs.  

AGI labs try to retain moats from their competitors and only a few have access to the necessary compute for training large models. So, OpenAI might be, say, 6 months ahead of Anthropic or Google or 12 months ahead of China. But obviously different groups are going to be different places and lurching forward all the time. The point is that if you get to the data centre of geniuses first in 6 months, you can have a data centre of supergeniuses because in those 6 months you get 5-10 years of advances in AGI and a data centre of supergeniuses. At that sweet spot you have a potentially massive advantage over your competitors (other AGI companies or China). And what do you do with it? "If you say to me bomb tomorrow, I say to you why not bomb today. If you say to me bomb this afternoon, I say to you bomb this morning."

And people wonder why I am depressed.

Manhattan Projects

The neutron was discovered in 1932, nuclear fission, the first nuclear reactor started operating in 1942 and the first fission bombs, both uranium and plutonium were exploded in 1945. That's very rapid progress, basically less than 7 years, but in the light of extreme circumstances. Many people were sceptical that a bomb was possible at first, for instance, Bohr, who also didn't think there was any need for secrecy about research results in the late 1930s. But Fermi eventually agreed not to publish his work on carbon as a moderator and the Germans went with heavy water, one reason they didn't build a reactor in WWII. Heisenberg possibly wasn't trying that hard and the money was spent on the V-2 programme. The V-2 had a payload of 1 tonne; Fat Man and Little Boy were both ~4.5 tonnes, so you would need a bigger rocket and to to missile the nukes. I guess you could imagine AHs in which the Germans did that by 1950 or so. But, of course, the thing about nuclear weapons is that luckily they are still hard to make even 80 years later. You aren't going to make one in your garden shed and they are expensive to build and maintain. There are 8 declared nuclear powers or 8 to have carried out detected tests. The Vela Incident was probably a joint Israeli-South African test and South Africa did build uranium bombs, so that's 10 countries that have built nuclear weapons. Lots of other countries have had programmes at various times of varying degrees of credibility and lots of countries could build them quickly if needed. It would probably take about 18 months to build a gun-type fission weapon. The US didn't bother testing Little Boy before dropping it on Japan.

The Manhattan Project cost ~250G$ in 2025 dollars, well within the reach of private companies and certainly inline with current A(G)I investments. The question is whether the US government should do this. The argument is that the US must win the AGI race to protect freedom and democracy. Leopold Aschenbrenner has the excuse of writing last year, but it must be difficult for Amodei to keep a straight face. The old world no longer exists. But the fundamental question is whether AGI is like nuclear weapons in that will change the geopolitical structure of the world fundamentally whether in 2 years or 20 or whether it's more of the same. WE haven't got the data centres of geniuses yet and I won't believe it until we get some concrete breakthrough such as room temperature superconductors or a proof of the Riemann hypothesis. I will write later about whether it even makes sense to talk of trying to maintain an A(G|S)I Gap with China, but could the US nationalise its AGI efforts even if it wanted to. Sure, the big training clusters could be, but did Deepseek really train on a much smaller one? Plus if everything is inside a SCIF that means you are only going to have US citizens working there. William Penney took himself and knowledge back to the UK and built Britain's bomb. All those non-citizen AGI researchers in the US could do the same to their own countries. And, of course, if the US is in an AGI Race with China, it is also now necessarily in one with Europe.

"How many OPS (VAX 780 = 1e6) do you think it will take to run your system at one human equivalent rate?"

Gemini Pro 1.5 with Deep Research wrote me a nice little essay on relativistic spaceflight. But it was hopelessly wrong. So, I will have to keep at this question until I find a system that can answer it correctly. Because this is not an especially esoteric PhD-level question. Certainly, it's the kind of question that might have appeared on a mods or finals paper.

Yesterday, I came across this 2007 email to the AGI list

J Storrs Hall, PhD [email protected] via v2.listbox.com
26 Aug 2007, 17:20
to agi

How many OPS (VAX 780 = 1e6) do you think it will take to run your system at
one human equivalent rate?

Give me 3 numbers:

= to George W Bush

= to yourself (professional courtesy: I assume your IQ is 150)

= to von Neumann, Einstein, Franklin, Leibniz, Euler, Gauss, Newton, etc.

Thanks,

Josh

ps -- to start things off, I'll say 10^12, 10^14, 10^16

***

A VAX 780 would have been a nice computer to have in 1977. It seems a lot more fun that our current ones, but our current ones are a lot faster. The Jetson Orin Nano Super Developer Kit offers 67 INT8 TOPS, which is nearly 10¹⁴ OPS, but we don't have yourself yet. What about George W. Bush? People misunderestimated him and he's probably fairly described as a general intelligence. We don't have a virtual George W. Bush yet, though we could probably create an app that could imitate him at some level, but that's not going to quite be what we want yet. Certainly, I don't think George despite being a fighter pilot would be much good on the relativistic starship question, but an IQ 150 person should. So, we are not there yet. Project DIGITS is 1 petaflop (10¹⁵ OPS). We aren't at the data centre of geniuses yet. How many OPS would that be? The fastest computers on TOPS500 are exascale, ~10¹⁸ FLOPS. But how much compute are the big AI labs using? This would tend to suggest that the data center of geniuses would be exascale. But that might mean each genius was around 10 petaflops. But we aren't there yet and won't be until we can crack the relativistic starship question.