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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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Compared to where we were ten years ago, it looks like AGI is achievable now. It seems before we didn't even have an architecture that you could spend infinite compute on that would ever arrive at an answer. But now it seems like we do! It's clear that you can get them to do reasoning-like things and it's mainly a matter of how much compute you can throw at it. So that's amazing.

But the question that remains, is will this architecture get to AGI within economic feasibility? It doesn't quite seem like the right architecture. They use much, much more power than humans do to solve the same problems, for example.

If we have to continually 10x the amount of inference compute we throw at a model to cut the error rate in half, we might exhaust the capacity of the Earth before we reach AGI.