There’s already an eerie convergence of AGI timelines (~2027?) and Taiwan watchers’ Taiwan invasion timelines (China ready to invade Taiwan by 2027?)—a convergence that will surely only heighten as the world wakes up to AGI. (Imagine if in 1960, the vast majority of the world’s uranium deposits were somehow concentrated in Berlin!) It seems to me that there is a real chance that the AGI endgame plays out with the backdrop of world war. Then all bets are off.
Recent USG efforts like the CHIPS Act have been trying to onshore more AI chip production to the US (as insurance in case of the Taiwan contingency). While onshoring more of AI chip production to the US would be nice, it’s less critical than having the actual datacenter (on which the AGI lives) in the US. If having chip production abroad is like having uranium deposits abroad, having the AGI datacenter abroad is like having the literal nukes be built and stored abroad. Given the dysfunction and cost we’ve seen from building fabs in the US in practice, my guess is we should prioritize datacenters in the US while betting more heavily on democratic allies like Japan and South Korea for fab projects—fab buildouts there seem much more functional.
Total US electricity generation has barely grown 5% in the last decade. Utilities are starting to get excited about AI (instead of 2.6% growth over the next 5 years, they now estimate 4.7%!). But they’re barely pricing in what’s coming. The trillion-dollar, 100GW cluster alone would require ~20% of current US electricity generation in 6 years; together with large inference capacity, demand will be multiples higher. To most, this seems completely out of the question. Some are betting on Middle Eastern autocracies, who have been going around offering boundless power and giant clusters to get their rulers a seat at the AGI-table. But it’s totally possible to do this in the United States: we have abundant natural gas. Powering a 10GW cluster would take only a few percent of US natural gas production and could be done rapidly. Even the 100GW cluster is surprisingly doable. Right now the Marcellus/Utica shale (around Pennsylvania) alone is producing around 36 billion cubic feet a day of gas; that would be enough to generate just under 150GW continuously with generators (and combined cycle power plants could output 250 GW due to their higher efficiency). It would take about ~1200 new wells for the 100GW cluster. Each rig can drill roughly 3 wells per month, so 40 rigs (the current rig count in the Marcellus) could build up the production base for 100GW in less than a year.The Marcellus had a rig count of ~80 as recently as 2019 so it would not be taxing to add 40 rigs to build up the production base. More generally, US natural gas production has more than doubled in a decade; simply continuing that trend could power multiple trillion-dollar datacenters. The harder part would be building enough generators/turbines; this wouldn’t be trivial, but it seems doable with about $100B of capex for 100GW of natural gas power plants. Combined cycle plants can be built in about two years; the timeline for generators would be even shorter still.
It is a delusion of those who have unconsciously internalized our brief respite from history that this will not summon more primordial forces. Like many scientists before us, the great minds of San Francisco hope that they can control the destiny of the demon they are birthing. Right now, they still can; for they are among the few with situational awareness, who understand what they are building. But in the next few years, the world will wake up. So too will the national security state. History will make a triumphant return.
And yet within just a few weeks, the entire country shut down and Congress had appropriated trillions of dollars (literally >10% of GDP). Seeing where the exponential might go ahead of time was too hard, but when the threat got close enough, existential enough, extraordinary forces were unleashed. The response was late, crude, blunt—but it came, and it was dramatic.
As the OOMs go from theoretical extrapolation to (extraordinary) empirical reality, gradually, a consensus will form, too, among the leading scientists and executives and government officials: we are on the cusp, on the cusp of AGI, on the cusp of an intelligence explosion, on the cusp of superintelligence. And somewhere along here, we’ll get the first genuinely terrifying demonstrations of AI: perhaps the oft-discussed “helping novices make bioweapons,” or autonomously hacking critical systems, or something else entirely. It will become clear: like it or not, this technology will be an utterly decisive military technology. Even if we’re lucky enough to not be in a major war, it seems likely that the CCP will have taken notice and launched a formidable AGI effort. Perhaps the eventual (inevitable) discovery of the CCP’s infiltration of America’s leading AI labs will cause a big stir.
45:58Do you have a better idea about how to fight against what’s coming? If you think you can somehow just buy safety for yourself, you are both wrong and pathetic. The best hope any of us have is to maximize the number of things that survive. If you and everyone else sell to bankers in hopes of buying a personal ticket out, we are all dead.