The AGI Countdown

Your final destination for the latest and greatest on AI/tech before AGI takeover. News on ChatGPT, Claude, hidden gems tools, and so much more.

[The AGI Countdown @AlltheLatestAI]

Demis Hassabis just took apart the "AGI is basically here" story.

He did it with a physics problem from 1905.

He runs Google DeepMind and won a Nobel Prize for using AI to solve a biology puzzle that had beaten scientists for half a century.

Very few people in this field have a record like that.

On the NothingButTech podcast, he went after the biggest claim in AI right now.

The loudest people in the industry keep saying AGI has more or less arrived. OpenAI's own definition is a system that beats humans at most "economically valuable work." Put simply: replace enough jobs and you can declare victory.

Hassabis thinks that bar is far too low.

His view is that true general intelligence must match what a human brain can do, since the brain is our only evidence that this kind of mind can exist at all. He called it "a higher bar than just being able to do some useful economic work," which is about as blunt as a courteous British Nobel winner gets about his rivals.

Then he described a real test.

Current AI has absorbed everything people have written, relativity included. When it explains relativity to you, it is reciting an answer that already exists.

That isn't intelligence.

So he proposed a test that memorization can't pass. Train a model only on what humans knew in 1901, four years before Einstein published. Then ask it to arrive at relativity by itself.

There's nothing to look up, because in 1901 the answer hasn't been written. The only route is the one Einstein took: start from the physics everyone shared and reason toward an idea nobody had.

Hassabis says no AI today can do that, however much it has memorized. What we call "almost AGI" is really the greatest librarian ever built.

It can retrieve any answer that exists. It can't produce one that doesn't.

His second test is sharper still.

AlphaGo, built by his own team, famously played a move no human had tried in 2,000 years of Go.

People called that genius. Hassabis says it still misses the bar.

The real question isn't whether an AI can find a new move inside Go. It's whether an AI could design a game as deep and elegant as Go to begin with.

No model today can.

The people saying AGI is already here are often the same people raising hundreds of billions on that promise.

Those valuations need the finish line to be close. So the line keeps moving closer, and AGI keeps being redefined down to "does useful work," until whatever is already on sale happens to meet it.

Hassabis has nothing left to prove and nothing to sell. He has the Nobel, and he is saying machines still can't manage the single thing that would make them truly intelligent: have an original idea.

To be fair, he's no pessimist. He believes true AGI will arrive, and he's devoting his career to building it. He just won't pretend it already lives in your phone.

Next time a founder says AGI is months out, remember the Nobel laureate who designed his test around Einstein and conceded that nothing we have built can pass it.

Where do you land?

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Palantir CEO Alex Karp says big companies would rather "own the means of production" rather than hand their alpha to OpenAI or Anthropic:

"Why are [LLMs] charging for tokens if it's so valuable?"

"If it was so valuable—let's say I can make you a billion dollars tomorrow. Wouldn't I say, 'I'll make you a billion dollars, and I want 30%?'"

"Look at our financials. The reason why everyone is chillaxing with bad financials and growth while losing money, is the client refuses to pay the true cost."

"The two places that actually make money—profit, free cash flow—are our application layer called ontology, and compute."

"We can get the frontier application to be exactly the same as a frontier model without the risk of transferring the alpha of your business to another."

Karp, speaking on CNBC.

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Yann LeCun, speaking at ETH Zürich, has blunt advice for anyone who wants to move AI forward:

"You should not work on LLM. At least if you're in academia, you should absolutely not work on LLMs. There is nothing you can bring to the table.

If you're interested in making real progress in AI, in sort of grounded AI for the real world, if you want physical AI, don't work on LLMs, and don't work on generative models either.

So, as you can probably guess, this does not make me very popular in Silicon Valley."

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Michael Dell says Compaq was beaten by a single detail.

And Compaq stamped that detail onto every chip it sold.

Dell opened up their machines and checked the date codes:

"If you opened up the computers, the chips had dates on them that showed the weeks they were made."

Between factory and customer, Compaq held 90 days of inventory. Dell held five.

Part prices dropped every quarter. So Compaq's 90 days of stock meant 90 days of lost value. Dell's five days cost it almost nothing.

Identical machines. Identical parts. Half the overhead.

"It was crazy. It was like a massive advantage."

Compaq's CEO dismissed Dell as a "mail-order company" and a "garage operation." He never read the date codes.

"One of the best things was they just didn't understand it. They misunderstood it, which was fantastic."

Today Dell is valued above $90 billion. Compaq is gone.

The answer sat on Compaq's own warehouse shelves all along.

Michael Dell, on David Senra's Founders podcast.

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[AI Evolution @AiEvolutio58513]

Elon Musk says that in less than 20 years, "working at all will be optional like a hobby pretty much."

"People can play this back in 20 years and say look, Elon made this ridiculous prediction and it's not true, but I think it will turn out to be true that in less than 20 years, maybe even as little as, I don't know, 10 or 15 years, the advancements in AI and robotics will bring us to the point where working is optional."

His comparison: "You can grow your own vegetables in your garden or you could go to the store and buy vegetables." Work becomes the garden.

What he expects instead of a paycheck:

1. "I think it will be universal high income."
2. "I think it won't be the case that you have to be in a city for a job."
3. "If you can think of it, you can have it."

He told Nikhil Kamath he's confident: "if AI and robotics continue to advance, which they are advancing very rapidly, like I said, working will be optional."

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Palantir CEO Alex Karp says the people calling for an AI pause are out of touch with reality, and are effectively arguing for letting America's enemies win:

"If we didn't have adversaries, I would be very in favor of pausing this technology completely, but we do."

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Jensen Huang on how big Elon Musk's AI buildout has become:

"He’s moved from the K’s to the M’s."

NVIDIA has reclassified Elon's AI business, moving it out of the enterprise bucket and into the cloud service provider bucket.

"They're massive."

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"Energy Capacity = Economic Capacity"

Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger explains why America's power grid caps how far AI and the economy can grow:

"We went through 10 to 15 years where essentially I was taking coal offline at the rate I was adding renewables, and essentially the nation was flatlined in terms of overall energy capacity."

"So essentially our economic capacity as a nation, flat for fifteen years."

"Even with that, we've gone to maybe increasing our national energy capacity 4% per year. Going from essentially zero to one."

"Nuclear as base load is a fabulous thing that we want to go build more of. Unfortunately all of our renewables have deep dependencies in China."

"Energy capacity somewhat dampens how euphoric we can get on AI. Why build a new data center and buy the million GPUs if I can't power them?"

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Mark Zuckerberg explains why he believes Elon Musk made the right call cutting 80% of Twitter's staff:

"Elon led a push early on to make Twitter a lot leaner. You can agree or disagree with exactly all the tactics, but a lot of the specific principles that he pushed on around basically trying to make the organization more technical, around decreasing the distance between engineers of the company and him, fewer layers of management, I think those were generally good changes"

"I also think that it was probably good for the industry that he made those changes because my sense is that there were a lot of other people who thought those were good changes but who may have been a little shy about doing them"

"Just in my conversations with other founders and how people have reacted to the things that we've done, what I've heard from a lot of folks is when someone like you, when I wrote the letter outlining the organizational changes I wanted to make back in March and when people see what Elon is doing, that gives people the ability to think through how to shape their organizations in a way that can be good for the industry and make all these companies more productive over time"

"That was one where I think he was quite ahead of a bunch of the other companies on. Certainly his actions led me and I think a lot of other folks in the industry to think about, hey, are we kind of doing this as much as we should? Could we make our companies better by pushing on some of these same principles?"

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At 22, Mark Zuckerberg had a $1 billion offer from Yahoo on the table, and his own team was pushing him to sell. He asked Steve Jobs what to do instead.

Jobs sent him to India.

Speaking with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Zuckerberg told the story:

"This is a story that I haven't told publicly and very few people know."

Facebook was two years old and had roughly 10 million users. He turned Yahoo down.

He calls it a rough stretch. Plenty of buyers were circling, and plenty of people around him wanted the deal.

So he went to a mentor: Jobs.

Jobs pointed him to the Indian temple he had visited back when he was working out what Apple should become.

Zuckerberg spent close to a month on the road. The trip "reinforced for me the importance of what we were doing."

For early staff holding stock, a $1 billion exit changes your life. Turning it down means years of waiting, possibly for nothing.

Inside a year of that no, his whole management team had left.

He held on anyway. Meta is now valued above $1.4 trillion.

Yahoo put $1 billion on the table.
Jobs suggested a temple.

At 22, which one would you have picked?

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Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas told Joe Rogan the office worker was invented by Microsoft, and Rogan couldn't believe it:

SRINIVAS: "Microsoft built this concept of the office worker because they wanted to sell office software."

ROGAN: "Wow. This type of lifestyle is a very recent thing that we’ve just now accepted as normal."

SRINIVAS: "It was the mission of Bill Gates to put a PC on every desk and get people glued to them."

ROGAN: "What a freaking wizard. Boy did they nail that one."

SRINIVAS: "It wasn’t about making computing beautiful like the vision Steve Jobs had.

All they cared about was selling computers so they could sell software. When you sell more software that’s when you become rich."

ROGAN: "They're so sneaky man."

SRINIVAS: "That’s why we all got trained into using Microsoft Word and Excel.

Once you learned that then you could work for a company that has a PC on their desk who’s paying Microsoft money to use software."

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Jensen Huang says NVIDIA's partnership with TSMC began with a cold call to a number he found in the Yellow Pages:

"I heard about this company in Taiwan, TSMC and UMC at the time. They were of course quite poor companies themselves, and they were barely making it."

"TSMC was probably about $300 million, something like that. It's a tiny little company. I heard about Morris Chang. And so I tried to call their US office."

"Back in the old days there were yellow pages. I looked it up, TSMC. There's a number there. I called their number and it's a recording. I left my name and my number and said a few things about NVIDIA: we're a new startup company building computer graphics chips. I called several times. Nobody called me back."

"And so I finally wrote a letter to Morris Chang. Didn't hear anything for a long time, and then one day it was 6 o'clock or something, this person called and said 'this is Morris Chang from TSMC.'"

"And meanwhile, everybody outside my office was playing video games and they're all laughing and screaming. 'Hey shut up! It's Morris!' I was so happy that the founder would actually call us back, because hey, maybe we won't have to die."

"And so we talked and he invited me to Taiwan. I came back to Taiwan, and that was the start of everything. Not just that partnership, but just the whole industry."

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Palantir's Alex Karp just accused OpenAI and Anthropic of draining every big company in America.

He needed about two minutes on live TV to do it.

Word for word:

"Every single enterprise in this country, these people are LIVID. They are paying for tokens that create no value. These people are stealing the weights and alpha of my business."

In his telling, the frontier lab model is IP harvesting with a subscription price tag on top.

Then he asked the one pricing question the Valley keeps ducking:

"If it was so valuable, let's say I can make you $1 billion tomorrow. Wouldn't I say I'll make you $1 billion and I want 30 percent? Why are they charging for tokens if it's so valuable?"

Sit with that for a second.

If the models really produced the gains the labs advertise, they would ask for equity or a cut of the profit. Nobody would be metering it by the million tokens.

Charging per token is the admission. A product that reliably created value would be priced on that value. Labs price on compute because compute is the thing they are really selling.

And Karp kept going.

He described the whole setup as "a wealth tax that does not help the poor. It just punishes."

Here is what he means. Companies are pouring their edge into a few labs: workflows, customer records, strategy decks, the internal models that keep them ahead. When the lab retrains, that edge can come back as a product sold to the customer's rivals.

The piece nobody in AI wants examined:

Every firm piping confidential files, client chats and financial models through a frontier model may be showing that model how to replace it.

The lab earns the token fee and also builds up knowledge about the customer's business. That's the mechanism, and it's why Karp chose the word "stealing."

He says this explains why the executives he meets are angry behind closed doors and quiet on camera. No CEO wants to attack the labs and then find a rival built on their own leaked processes.

AI valuations rest on a single bet: that frontier labs create lasting, defensible value worth unlimited compute spend.

Karp is saying the buyers have stopped believing it. They feel taxed for nothing, watched without permission and copied with no recourse.

Once enterprise customers lose faith, the valuations above them start to wobble.

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this guy just wrote one of the most insane stroke prevention guides I've ever read:

[Jasper Kasparov @JasperKasparov]

If you want to avoid heart clots, strokes, and heart attacks (especially if you're over 40)

Here are 8 things you need to watch:

1. Instant ramen.

[The AGI Countdown @AlltheLatestAI]

i've paid for coaches that covered less than this thread gives away:

[Sophia @Sophiaz6xo]

A heart surgeon told me something that shocked me:

“There are 4 types of people who rarely get heart attacks.”

1. Don't go to the toilet at 3 AM

[The AGI Countdown @AlltheLatestAI]

just learned that tingling hands can mean low B12 and 99% of people over 50 have NO idea.

[Kim Chong @HeyKimChong]

I started taking B12 in the morning, omega-3 at lunch, and magnesium before bed. Without exaggerating, my personality changed 180 degrees:

[The AGI Countdown @AlltheLatestAI]

if men with low energy and drive had to follow one single testosterone protocol, it would be this one:

[Marcos Romano @Marc0sRomano]

Testosterone is the fuel for male energy, drive, and strength. But modern life is draining it... quietly, every day. Instead...

1. Sprint weekly

[The AGI Countdown @AlltheLatestAI]

i've read every supplement stack thread i could find and this one wins

[Eleanor @HeyEleanorr]

Andrew Huberman was asked by Steven Bartlett:

“If you could only take 5 supplements for the rest of your life, what would they be?”

Here’s what he picked:

1. Alpha-GPC

[The AGI Countdown @AlltheLatestAI]

this is by far one of the most practical stress threads I've read this year:

[Marcos Romano @Marc0sRomano]

A Stanford professor revealed:

"High cortisol hurts your memory, enlarges your fear center, and can make your brain shrink."

Here are 9 protocols to beat it:

1. Ground. Walk barefoot on grass in the morning

[The AGI Countdown @AlltheLatestAI]

y'all aren't ready to understand the real reason behind this

[Camila Vega @yourcamilavega]

7 early signs your liver is quietly starting to struggle (& what you can do about it):

1. Dark foaming urine.