AGI won’t have a launch day. In 2019 the best AI wrote like a preschooler. By 2023, a smart high schooler. Now it does junior engineer work. The finish line isn’t a press conference, it’s a hiring decision some company makes on a random Tuesday.
The Manhattan Project cost $35 billion in today’s money. Apollo, about $300 billion. The AI buildout spends a Manhattan Project every three weeks and an Apollo every five months. No war forced this. It’s what a civilization does when it decides the future is worth building.
There’s an old line that fits: a truly intelligent machine is the last invention humans need to make by hand, everything after gets built with it. So “what’s after AI” and “what does AI unlock first” are the same question.