If this is the way to superintelligence, it remains a bizarre one. “This is back to a million monkeys typing for a million years generating the works of Shakespeare,” Emily Bender told me. But OpenAI’s technology effectively crunches those years down to seconds. A company blog boasts that an o1 model scored better than most humans on a recent coding test that allowed participants to submit 50 possible solutions to each problem—but only when o1 was allowed 10,000 submissions instead. No human could come up with that many possibilities in a reasonable length of time, which is exactly the point. To OpenAI, unlimited time and resources are an advantage that its hardware-grounded models have over biology. Not even two weeks after the launch of the o1 preview, the start-up presented plans to build data centers that would each require the power generated by approximately five large nuclear reactors, enough for almost 3 million homes.
We already have fission power, solar, wind, hydro, large scale battery storage, mechanical batteries (you can literally store renewable energy using a reservoir), electric cars, blimps, sail powered boats, etc, etc. We’ve had all of these technologies for quite some time.
And yet, we’re still burning coal, oil, and gas.
There’s no magical invention that’s going to fix the basic problem, which is that we have an economic system that demands infinite growth and we live on a finite planet.
Even if we crack fusion today, we won’t be able to build out enough fusion infrastructure fast enough to be a solution on its own. And we’d still be building those fusion plants using trucks and earth movers and cranes that burn diesel.
You cannot out-tech a problem that is, fundamentally, social. At best a hyper-intelligent AGI is going to tell us the solution that we already know; get rid of the billionaires who are driving all this climate damage with their insatiable search for profit. At which point the billionaires who own the AGI will turn it the fuck off until they can reprogram it to only offer “solutions” that maintain the status quo.