We have digital intelligence, but it's so unevenly distributed that much of the world still operates like it's 1990.
I can do almost anything from my phone, but people still drive to offices that haven't changed in half a century. We have models that code better than most engineers, yet drug discovery still takes decades, total factor productivity has stalled since the 1970s, and our power grid runs on software older than me. Somewhere along the way, we ended up serving the software that was supposed to serve us. Everyone talks about AGI while sitting at the same desks, staring at the same screens, solving rehashed versions of the same problems. Where's my flying car?
In each successive year since 2021 I found the economic output per token generated increases by an order of magnitude with each new modality—seq2seq, GPT-2, ChatGPT, deep research. Yet we keep using AGI to improve software instead of replacing software entirely.
AGI diffusion is the bottleneck to what we actually want: intelligence that works beyond the screen, diffused across the real economy where the problems that matter live. This may require significant capital and model training, but it certainly will happen with far fewer people who deliver insanely outsized impact. Once done, the question will not be whether an abundant future arrives, but why it was delayed at all.