Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedAlex Imas: belief
4 Jun 2026 Dwarkesh Podcast Alex Imas and Phil Trammell – What remains scarce after AGI?
“I think the open model thing is going to be a big point here. If we’re indeed in a world where the open models are six months behind the frontier—or nine months—then we’ll hit AGI, we’ll hit whatever, and in six months, everybody has access to this resource.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Alex Imas
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 4 Jun 2026
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
Transcript context
…But then again, I guess if you just look at how concentrated the S&P is over time, just these big tech companies much more so… I guess this goes to a fundamental point that it’s hard to reason about how much of the gains from AI these individual private companies will be able to control. I think the open model thing is going to be a big point here. If we’re indeed in a world where the open models are six months behind the frontier—or nine months—then we’ll hit AGI, we’ll hit whatever, and in six months, everybody has access to this resource. This goes to show you that every question is connected to every other. That question about whether there’s runaway gains connects to questions about recursive self-improvement. Even if not recursive self-improvement, then continual learning, or online learning, which lets a model learn on the job. So if it’s deployed, it gets to learn more. These are just forecasting technical questions which then impact whether Uganda will have any purchase on the returns of AGI. The reason I’m emphasizing the question is I think both for the messy middle and for developing countries, a recommendation that is often made naively is that you’ve got to do some kind of retraining. You’ve got to do some kind of jobs program, or you’ve got to have them build data centers in your country. I think you guys are suggesting something closer to just buying the index of AGI. That’s probably a much cleaner strategy and much more likely to succeed.…
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