Mike Israetel: preference

Transcript context

…this with Liron. Why is AGI after ASI? Because artificial general intelligence has either depending on who you speak to no good definition at all or multiple spectra definitions somewhere between shitty like the you know various tests of if you, you know, can text something as a truly intelligent. All the way through, I think very good. But artificial general intelligence, typically, some of the better definitions encompass all of the kinds of intelligence and abilities that human beings are able to put out. And honestly, a vibe perspective, if you say like we've really cracked AGI, but your machine can't do some kind of cognitive work that a human can, you haven't cracked AGI in any meaningful respect. But because humans have some very interesting abilities that we just don't have the reach for from kind of an integration perspective, for example, smells and tastes. I mean, nanotech's got a bit of a way to go to get a machine to smell and taste in a meaningful way. And so like something about being a chef in being able to cognitively rank and tier tastes and smells and spectra and functionally employ them in real life to make food, that's not gonna happen probably in 2627. Right? But then we look back and so AGI because it is human inclusive, and that means we have to replicate every kind of human intelligence or say confidently we have AGI from my perspective. All the following all bullshit dilettante takes by the way. Then, you know, AGI is actually like pretty tough. Will happen I think, but tough. Now, artificial super intelligence is can be thought of in many ways, but I think once you have something that on many domains of human ability, not all, is radically more intelligent, it functionally vibe check wise is super intelligence. For example, something that is linguistically, mathematically, scientifically, three-dimensional object rotation, world model depth, recursion ability is 100 times the power of a human. You can tell me it's not super intelligent because it doesn't know how to smell or taste. It's never seen the world with its own eyes even though it scanned all of YouTube and integrated all of YouTube's visual data into the integrated 3 d world model. Can I swear a little bit or is that not a good name? It's a fucking artificial super intelligence then. Whatever. Right? And so I think because in many respects, like so I work with a few AIs, but I love OpenAI's product suite. I pay the infinity amount per month to get the pro version, the pro subscription for GPT. And so a GPT 5 pro is in some respects not as smart as me yet. Mostly because it can't cross link distant concepts together and integrated whole as well, because that's not really what it was designed to do because that would burn a shitload of tokens for an ROI that for most people is meaningless. But boy does it do black hole physics better than me and almost everyone and recently better than every scientist because it's got novel discoveries now. or an ROI that for most people is meaningless. But boy does it do black hole physics better than me and almost everyone and recently better than every scientist because it's got novel discoveries now. And so you take the abilities of just GPT 5, right, and in the back rooms at OpenAI, they have something that just beats the shit out of GPT 5 and it's currently getting fine tuned or you're post trained whatever. That thing's probably 10 times as smart. That's super intelligence. Also, factual knowledge about the world. I mean like, what percent do you think you know of total data, total real things about the world? How tall are people? What do they look like? Where know, what's the capital of France? That stuff compared to just GPT 5. I mean, it's some infinitesimally small fraction that on knowledge base is already super intelligence. I mean, put GPT 5 against any Jeopardy winner and you get the world's biggest creaming all of a sudden. That sounds like 1 of my older films. Am I right? So so in in in many respects, I think in 2026, we are going to see AI systems that 10 x or 100 x human abilities or 2 x or anything between that. And so once you get to maybe 2 thirds of all cognitive abilities, maybe 75%, maybe 80%, demonstrably machines are just like categorically superior by orders of magnitude, that is super intelligence. So super intelligence 2 ways, on vibes and heuristic by what I just described, and also on effect. I mean, if you have a smart enough AI and it's crapping out novel hypotheses once an hour, and it takes scientists weeks to grind through them and it starts getting 60%, 80%, 90% hit rate. I'm like, it understands the cell and it's giving us novel disease cures every week. That is super intelligence. And so super intelligence has to be measured by 2 things. 1 is under the hood cognitive science abilities, but the other is a real world effect because here's another really big thing super quick. You don't have super intelligence really in truthful evidence to convince most skeptics until you have the fruits of its labor. It's like someone tells you they're really rich. You're like, can you buy me a flight to Dubai? They're like, oh, money's tight right now. You're like, I believe you, but I don't. But if if you know, Elon Musk, you're like, hey, you buy me a flight to Dubai? He's like, yes. I just bought you Dubai Airlines. So you're like, the airline. You're like, yeah. I just acquired it. You're like, right. Okay. Wow. That's a demonstration. And so I think in 2026, I'm very confident though never certain from scientific perspective. CIA probability scale extremely likely 97 to a 100% that in sometime in late 20 26, we are going to start opening the cornucopia of machine intelligence that people understand that at least parts of machine intelligence are absolutely super intelligent. Because of exponentials by '27, '28, '29, the shit is gonna get completely insane. There is…

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