Ajit Banergzy

Free markets , Pro- Liberty

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[Ruxandra Teslo 🧬 @RuxandraTeslo]

In SF circles it's become low-status to suggest that "AGI" won't automatically solve everything.

I don't doubt the models are getting smarter. But intelligence was never the only thing standing between us and a transformed physical world.

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1. Intelligence is often not the main bottleneck

Lately, when I talk to people at AI labs, I keep hearing the same thing: that working on regulatory barriers to the diffusion of medical innovation is a waste of my time. AGI will solve all of that, they assure me, with the pitying look one might give a naive hamster awaiting its slaughter. I think they're wrong.

We've had the technology to build better housing for decades, yet it's more expensive than ever: this is because housing is a question of political will, not just capability. The same goes for medicine and many other "physical progress" areas.

2. San Francisco has become a monoculture.

Certain SF tech circles have hardened into something close to a monoculture, where it's now genuinely low-status to suggest AGI might not be wholly transformative on its own.

The people who were early and right about AI made fortunes, and being right about the big thing has calcified into an assumption that they're right about everything. To question the most extreme claims about the effects on the real world is to be marked as dim, low-IQ, insufficiently "AGI-pilled." The result I have seen is self-censorship: very smart tech people who privately acknowledge the bottlenecks do not really talk about it.

3. The contrarianism is counterfeit.

Because the outside world has long been skeptical of AI, people in SF feel like brave dissenters — even though, within their own circles, AGI-maximalism is the safe and status-conferring view. Believing yourself a misunderstood contrarian is intoxicating, and it makes the underlying conviction much harder to dislodge.

4. The world has not changed as much as capabilities would predict.

The "real world" has many barriers to diffusion that those who think intelligence is all that matters seem to ignore. I remember a Progress Conference in 2023 where the economist Tyler Cowen made exactly this argument to a room full of AGI-pilled attendees, many of whom were frankly incredulous. The capabilities, he suggested, would arrive faster than the changes they were meant to produce; GDP growth would disappoint relative to the hype, and there would be no massive job displacement. So far, the data seem to bear him out.

Some points on how this applies to medicine:

5. "AI will cure disease" faces bottlenecks far beyond AI.

Every lab CEO invokes curing disease to justify AI's risks, and investors reward any biotech with an AI story attached. AI will help of course, but the bottlenecks to medical progress are often about generating the right experimental data or policy, not necessarily intelligence. The proof: drug R&D productivity has fallen for sixty years (Eroom's Law), even as our scientific tools grew vastly more powerful. This is exactly the opposite of what raw capability alone would predict.

6. Clinical trials and policy are an important constraint.

The superficial rebuttal is that since most drugs fail for lack of efficacy, regulation can't explain the slowdown. But the constraint isn't the final approval, but whole process upstream: how easily human data can be collected and then actually used. China is racing ahead in biotech not through better basic science, but through regulatory reforms that allow faster learning from in-human data.

7. Even AI-for-biology responds to broken incentives.

Another example of how governance matters: our patent system rewards novel chemical matter, not novel biology. This means whoever validates a new target bears the risk but can't capture the reward once it's public. The result is "target herding": wave after wave of me-too drugs against the same de-risked pathways.

Tellingly, the best-funded AI-bio companies (Chai Discovery, Isomorphic Labs) target molecule optimization, so the tractable part, not the frontier of finding new targets. Even AI companies respond to incentives; fixating on intelligence while ignoring governance aims our effort at the wrong bottleneck.

Does this matter?

I think so...

We fixate on AGI gods, while more mundane problems pile up unattended. The social fabric is fraying in plain sight. More and more young adults cannot afford a house or sustain a relationship. People pour their youth into gambling apps, some of them now made more powerful by the very AI we keep discussing. People are de-skilling as they hand more thinking to machines.

Every one of these problems needs people working on it. Being in the thrall of digital deities that will magically dissolve all our problems pulls attention away from the simpler, more human troubles that are already here.

[Ajit Banergzy @banergzy]

@DeepakSrin66110 @rohitshinde121 Not true. Stop making things up.

even with this andolan it started in Gujarat with Price hike and spread to Bihar with JP and young insurgent LPY and Nitish - so broad based.

[Ajit Banergzy @banergzy]

@rohitshinde121 you are taking this too seriously. Indian politics is giant stable equilibrium, if you like it or not.

2012 was different due to high inflation, coalition government/strong left push , dumb fiscal policy stimulus excess by Mukher g

Rest, Indians like corruption and want it.

[Ajit Banergzy @banergzy]

@ag421337 @rohitshinde121 what do think the word liberal means ?

[Ajit Banergzy @banergzy]

@mcguinnessfortx Ethnic Chinese as group maybe already the leading group in frontier ai research.

[Ajit Banergzy @banergzy]

@iosif_lazaridis isn't gratitude a good thing ?

[Ajit Banergzy @banergzy]

@AvadhanyGirish Agree. But not necessary bad the way you are looking at it.

[turgut keskintürk @ttkeskinturk]

a new job market paper!

using surveys from almost 9.5 million college students over 35 years, I study the role of ideology in career aspirations. I show that ideology shapes what people want, a pattern much stronger among high-income students.

read here: https://t.co/7F9T2HkMLA

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

In The Better Angels of Our Nature I presented The Iliad as an example of the brutality the ancients took for granted. This has not been fully appreciated in the revisionism in the new Odyssey film or most of the commentary. "We should not act as if there is any higher value in honoring the ancient past, instead saving our reverence for how far we have come in the last few centuries. The best lesson that Homer can provide is gratitude that we no longer live in his world." We're All Still Living in Denial about the Greeks, by @RichardHanania https://t.co/kxXjcz1U46

[Ajit Banergzy @banergzy]

evo mismatch.

[Peter Berezin @PeterBerezinBCA]

I’m convinced that a major source of misery today is the huge (and growing) gap between the environment in which humans evolved and the one in which they currently live.

[Ajit Banergzy @banergzy]

lol

[KingoftheCoast @kingofthecoastt]

A few venture capitalists make all the money.

"...90% of investment profits are generated by 5% of VCs. Differences in education, prior work experience, and demographics predict career progression and investment outcomes, consistent with persistent investor-specific skills."

[Daniel Litt @littmath]

Maybe too obvious to be worth saying, but: frontier models are now obviously superhuman at some mathematical tasks, including ones that the profession has, historically, rewarded with prestige etc.

[Ajit Banergzy @banergzy]

The unending joys of Nehru’s muzzling speech with the First Amendment. `~

[Amit Varma @amitvarma]

"I feel that many of these fundamental rights have been framed from the point of view of a police constable."

-- Somnath Lahiri, Constituent Assembly debates, 1947.

[Ajit Banergzy @banergzy]

@grumpeoldman @amitvarma First amendment is itself unconstitutional. It was coup by Nehru to muzzle Indians.

[Ajit Banergzy @banergzy]

@amitvarma REPEAL THE FIRST AMENDMENT

IT IS A DISGRACE TO CONSTITUTIONAL POLITY.

[Ajit Banergzy @banergzy]

Repeal the 1 st Amendment

[Amit Varma @amitvarma]

"I feel that many of these fundamental rights have been framed from the point of view of a police constable."

-- Somnath Lahiri, Constituent Assembly debates, 1947.

[Bryan Caplan @bryan_caplan]

This generalizes broadly.

[Ajit Banergzy @banergzy]

@arvindsubraman The main thing is India not reaching or climbing up value chains of manu output at scale like Vietnam is doing.

India lacks even concentrated relatively skilled workers. Vietnam scores as much as UK in PISA ranking and likely will break out to rich country status.

[Ajit Banergzy @banergzy]

@indiaemerges It had experienced people with enough ground work and system experience first hand. Probably lot smarter as well.

Dipke I guess will join NCP in Maharashtra

[Ajit Banergzy @banergzy]

@3RenChengHu More than two-thirds of top-tier AI researchers working in the US overall got their undergraduate degrees in a different country, and China is the single largest source of that pipeline.

They will be at par or surpass in tech. 75 % pci by 2060 or so.