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Okay, we need to talk about this.
A few weeks ago, OpenAI announced o3 — their new model — and tech Twitter went absolutely insane. And if you’re unable to make sense of this, it can lead to a lot of fear about the role humans play in the future.
What’s so special about o3? Well, it scored with 87.5% accuracy on the ARC-AGI benchmark, which is a significant improvement from previous models.
Without the model being out yet, some people say we’ve reached AGI and that jobs won’t exist within 5 years. Others, Elon included, are saying that money will be meaningless in the future. Unless we collect the right perspective, everything we’ve known and everything we are doing to better ourselves and our businesses may be for nothing.
The main questions I’m interested in are:
- Will we be considered insects to our AGI overlords?
- If AGI can do everything humans can and more, what the f*** do we do?
- If jobs won’t exist, what do we focus on if we want to thrive?
I’ve accumulated quite a few thoughts on this throughout my years of study. In this letter, I’ve compiled a few of the most compelling cases for human uniqueness.
I hope I can give you a positive way to make sense of the world and orient your behavior.
Buckle in, my friends. This is the greatest time to be alive.
AI vs AGI — A Critical Difference
To understand what AI is and what it means for us, we need to start at the origin of that term. Before AI, there was cybernetics, an idea laid out by Norbert Wiener in 1948.
Cybernetics — ancient Greek for “helmsman” or another word for “governor” — is the idea of automatic, self-regulating control in a system. Acting, sensing, and comparing to a goal is a fundamental loop to intelligent systems. His key insight was that the world should be understood in terms of information. That complex systems like organisms, brains, and societies error-correct toward a goal, and if these feedback loops break down, the system breaks down. Entropy.
