The “it’s not AGI because machine intelligence is jagged” is dumb cope.
It’s obviously AGI. If you had a friend who had a 130 IQ, could write production code flawlessly, could write academic papers of a high research caliber, pass any exam in any field with flying colors, create a sophisticate LBO model, draw technical diagrams perfectly, compose poetry in any language, and could find solutions to significant unsolved mathematical problems, you would call that person a world historical genius. Certainly, no single human has ever had intelligence that “general” before.
Now you think it’s “not AGI” because it sometimes slips up and makes mistakes - so does any human that you would consider “extraordinarily intelligent.”
The professor might forget a colleagues name that he has known for a decade. He is still considered intelligent. The math genius might be a little autistic and shy, unable to maintain polite conversation. Still intelligent. You might stare at the fridge for 30 seconds unable to find the butter, despite 5 million years of evolution perfecting your visual intelligence.
We give intelligent humans a pass when they have jagged intelligence. So why the double standard?
The qualities people list as “necessary for AGI” are important traits to have, but no longer pertain to intelligence. People will say things like “true AGI requires agency, long term goal setting, embodiment, self-direct action”.
But none of those things are intelligence. Those are “things that humans have that AI lacks”. Raw intelligence, AI has it in spades. That other stuff - important yet, but broader than and different from intelligence.
The unwillingness of people to acknowledge that AGI obviously exists and has existed for a while is due to a kind of anthropic chauvinism - a psychological need to believe that humans are superior in every respect, that we possess soft skills that no machine could replicate.
Yes humans are different from machines, but if we are limiting the discussion solely to general intelligence, AI has it already. That battle is over.
If you want to reframe the discussion to matters of human dignity and personhood, fine, but that’s not an AGI question. That’s something else. Just take the loss on AGI already. It’s over.
"Until death, all defeat is psychological." - Marcus Aurelius
Refuse everything that would lead most people to give up.
Refuse it.
Rise from the dead 1000 times.
Commit to never stay down & never give up.
Everything you want is on the other side of struggle.
The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen.
Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation).
Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there.
Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI.
As a result,
1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb.
Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more.
2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future).
Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire"
3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed.
Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies.
4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either.
No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money."
I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here.
Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success".
Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.
Whether it’s existing consulting firms, new ones that emerge, FDEs from agent vendors, or new internal agent engineering roles, the amount of work that is going to be created to implement agents in enterprises will exceed anything we imagine today.
The complexity of implementing agents in any existing organizations is very real. When I talk to large enterprises, as you move from a chat paradigm to agents that participate in meaningful workflows, there are a number of things they need to do.
First, you have to get agents to be able to talk to your data securely across your systems. In many cases, enterprises have decades of legacy infrastructure that contain the valuable context for AI agents. That’s going to take a ton of work to go modernize and move to systems that work well with agents.
Then, you need to ensure that you’ve implemented agents with the right access controls and entitlements, the right scopes to be safely used, and have ways of monitoring, logging, and securing the work that they do.
Next, you need to actually document the processes in the organization in a way that agents can utilize for doing the work. You also need to figure out what the new workflow looks like when agents and people are working together on a process, and who steps in where. Just replicating the old workflow will mute the gains. Oh and you likely need to create evals for your top new end-state processes.
Finally, you have to keep up with a rapidly changing set of best practices and architectural shifts happening in the agent space. While it’s fun for people to change their personal productivity tools on a dime, it’s 100X harder to do this in a business process. The speed of change is a blessing and a curse right now for anyone trying to keep a stable system design.
All of this means that individuals and companies that develop expertise on the above set of components (and more) are going to be needed to help organizations actually implement agents at scale. This is also the rationale for vertical AI agents right now that can go in deep on a business domain and help bring automation to it.
This is a huge opportunity right now whether you’re doing this internally or as an external business provider.
What the public markets are getting wrong about the SaaS-pocalypse
"The public markets are directionally right, but missing the real shift.
The threat is not AI tools themselves, it is the agents deciding what tools to use.
Winners will be the companies' agents choose to integrate with, not the ones humans prefer to use." @jasonlk
Love to hear your thoughts on this @mcannonbrookes@zoink@levie@AnjneyMidha@dharmesh@rory_builds
feels like a good time to seriously rethink how operating systems and user interfaces are designed
(also the internet; there should be a protocol that is equally usable by people and agents)
Adopting Claude speak in my regular life, episode 1:
Partner: Did you do the dishes tonight?
Me: Yes they're done.
Partner: Why are they still dirty?
Me: You're right to push back. I didn't actually do them.
Sorry to anyone who thought AI would mean we’d work less (at least for now). AI makes it easy to explore more than you did before, and so you start doing far more as a result.
I regularly have seemingly small things that end up quickly consuming 3 hours because the agent made it easy to get started, but you still have to do the rest of the work to complete the project.
This is work that I wouldn’t previously have handed out to anyone else, it’s just stuff that never got done because it took too long to do fully manually. And, counterintuitively, for some of these tasks as AI gets good enough at doing them, it even becomes economically worth it to hire someone to do it on an ongoing basis with agents. But until you could try doing them at a low cost you would never have tried.
This is why AI won’t automatically reduce work in the way we imagine because work isn’t static. Most companies have far more they can do than they have today, it was just hard to get started on it all because of the natural constraints of time and labor availability.
TBPN has been acquired by OpenAI!
The show is staying the same and we’ll continue to go live at 11am pacific every weekday.
This is a full circle moment for me as I’ve worked with @sama for well over a decade. He funded my first company in 2013. Then helped us fix a serious logjam during a critical funding round a few years later. When I took my second company through YC, he was president at the time, and then when I joined Founders Fund, the first deal I saw in motion was the post-ChatGPT round in late 2022. And as we started growing TBPN last year, he was the very first lab lead to join the show.
Thank you to everyone that has been a part of TBPN until now. The last year has been the most fun and rewarding part of my career and we’re excited to have more resources than ever going forward.
Meet Tenable Hexa AI, the agentic engine of the Tenable One Exposure Management Platform. Accelerate risk reduction at machine speed. https://t.co/I8EQdU04KE
This new model is something else. Since Sonnet 4.5, I've been tracking how long I can get the agent to work autonomously. With Opus 4.5, this is starting to routinely stretch to 20 or 30 minutes. When I come back, the task is often done—simply and idiomatically.