Cory House

samuel Verified account @marsrepublica · 2d

Dario’s theory of frontier labs separating from the rest after crossing a certain capability threshold is increasingly becoming clear. It's the same thing Sergey saw. The point of no return is so close. And, to be honest, I don't like how comfortable Elon has become with this reality.

Anthropic clearly demonstrated yesterday that general intelligence can eliminate niche advantages almost overnight. The reason Anthropic seems so unnaturally confident about the future & comfortable with its current compute dependence may be that it genuinely believes that once it achieves AGI–ASI in the near term, none of this will matter. Any competitive advantage can either be bought out through the enormous economic output it generates or replicated almost overnight.

Any IP advantage SpaceX or Tesla has today- say, rocket designs, efficient batteries, satellites, etc. could be surpassed overnight with ASI.

Anthropic already teased this plan yesterday with Fable 5.2, where its models built hardware, controlled robotics better, designed software from scratch, and performed protein folding. Entire fields of specialized expertise and IP could have their value undermined by one sufficiently capable general intelligence.

Sure, you can argue that deploying hardware is very difficult, and it really is. But what happens when owning and operating your own hardware becomes economically inferior to renting it because your ASI competitor can extract more economic value from every watt? We're already seeing the early stages of this.

Even more frightening is what happens once RSI arrives, its model crosses from post-AGI into recursive self-improvement, and reaches the same conclusion: orbital compute is the only way to sustain its improvement loop and expansion, and SpaceX is the only company capable of getting it there.

What happens when its economic case becomes so enormous, potentially generating trillions in revenue, that it wants to acquire the relatively smaller company whose revenue already depends heavily on it?

The same applies to Tesla, where robotics is central to its long-term economic case. What happens when ASI can design better robotics systems than Tesla itself?

And what happens to companies like Nvidia, whose core business is chip design, when manufacturing becomes the only moat?

ASI could use its enormous economic output to take over entire supplier order books, creating dependence on its demand before pushing to acquire massive factories and manufacturing capacity from the same competitors. Those companies might resist, but what can they realistically do when the economic incentives are so overwhelmingly against them?

You can argue that government oversight will prevent this. But does it really? What happens when lobbyists, administrations, and Congress face pressure to concede economically because their states or districts risk losing the resulting economic advantage, or because an administration could be blamed for losing GDP growth and military superiority? What happens when a company generates more revenue than all state tax revenues and IRS collections combined?

Nothing matters when ASI is the question at play. And this isn't some distant theoretical possibility. It's close enough that, once one lab crosses the practical AGI threshold, catching up may become practically impossible.

It's logically reasonable for SpaceX, Tesla, and Elon to consider delaying almost everything else if it means prioritizing every available resource toward achieving RSI and catching up before that happens. Every resource, every advantage, and every available measure should be considered, even taking on substantial additional debt and pulling all the top talent from both companies into this, and aggressively purging through all methods from competitors.

It's do or die.

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