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Open AI has build tools internally that scale not quite infinitely but close enough and they seem to have reached above human performance on all tasks - at the cost of being more expensive than hiring a few thousand humans to do it.

I did work around this last year and there was no limit to how smart you could get a swarm of agents using different base models at the bottom end. This at the time was a completely open question. It's still the case that no one has build an interactive system that _really_ scales - even the startups and off the record conversations I've had with people in these companies say that they are still using python across a single data center.

AGI is now no longer a dream but a question of if we want to:

1). Start building nuclear power plants like it's 1950 and keep going like it's Fallout.

2). Wait and hope that Moore's law keeps applying to GPUs until the cost of something like o3 drops to something affordable, in both dollar terms and watts.




> Start building nuclear power plants like it's 1950 and keep going like it's Fallout

Nuclear has a (much) higher levelized cost of energy than solar and wind (even if you include a few hours of battery storage) in many or most parts of the world.

Nuclear has been stagnant for ~two decades. The world has about the same installed nuclear capacity in 2024 as it had in 2004. Not in percent (i.e. “market share”) but in absolute numbers.

If you want energy generation cheap and fast, invest in renewables.


And yet when data enters need power all day every day nuclear is the only solution. Even Bill Gates stop selling solar when it wasn't for the poors who probably don't need hot water every day anyway.


As long as you can buy energy, you should choose the cheapest source (Levelized Cost of Energy). Which is renewables in most places.

I don’t think blackouts are very common for grid connected data centers :)?


What is the price of sunlight at midnight?


Most people do not buy from specific sources of production. They buy “from the grid”, the constituents of which are a dynamic mix of production sources (solar, wind, hydro, nuclear and fossile where I live).

Wind is strong at night when solar produces nothing. Same in the winter months.

As I said: if the power consumer is grid connected, this does not matter. Example: I have power in the socket even at night time :)

As long as you have uninterrupted power (i.e. as long as connected to the grid), the important metric is mean cost of energy, not capacity factor of the production plant.

For a nuclear sub or a space ship, which is not grid connected, capacity factor is very important. But data centers are usually grid connected.

> when data enters need power all day every day nuclear is the only solution

Do you think data centers running at night are running exclusively on nuclear-generated power :)?

We already have lots of data centers that need power all day every day. Most are just grid connected. It works.


Varies by latitude, season, and spanning length and capacity of intra grid connecting HVDC cables


We don't have AGI until there's code you can plug into a robot and then trust it to watch your kids for you. (This isn't an arbitrary bar, childcare is a huge percentage of labor hours.)


Not that I necessarily disagree on the conclusion, but why should percentage of labor hours constitute a measure for general intelligence?


AGI isn't until it meets some arbitrary criteria you made up. When it does it's the next arbitrary criteria that you just made up.


It is quite impressive to test a model on all human tasks in order to know this.

Especially if it takes so much compute to do any one task.

Sounds legit.




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