Jeffrey, I appreciate your points about fusion’s potential, and the uncertainty around “foom.” However, I think framing this in terms of bottlenecks clarifies the core difference. The Industrial Revolution was transformative because it overcame the energy bottleneck. Today, while clean energy is vital, many transformative advancements are primarily bottlenecked by intelligence, not energy. Fusion addresses an important, existing constraint, but it’s a step removed from the frontier of capability. AI, particularly AGI, directly targets that intelligence bottleneck, potentially unlocking progress across virtually every domain limited by human cognitive capacity. This difference in which bottleneck is addressed makes the potential transformative impact, and thus the strategic landscape, fundamentally distinct. Even drastic cost reductions in energy don’t address the core limiting factor for progress in areas fundamentally constrained by our cognitive and analytical abilities.
Jeffrey, I appreciate your points about fusion’s potential, and the uncertainty around “foom.” However, I think framing this in terms of bottlenecks clarifies the core difference. The Industrial Revolution was transformative because it overcame the energy bottleneck. Today, while clean energy is vital, many transformative advancements are primarily bottlenecked by intelligence, not energy. Fusion addresses an important, existing constraint, but it’s a step removed from the frontier of capability. AI, particularly AGI, directly targets that intelligence bottleneck, potentially unlocking progress across virtually every domain limited by human cognitive capacity. This difference in which bottleneck is addressed makes the potential transformative impact, and thus the strategic landscape, fundamentally distinct. Even drastic cost reductions in energy don’t address the core limiting factor for progress in areas fundamentally constrained by our cognitive and analytical abilities.
This seems false given that AI training will be/is bottlenecked on energy.