🚀 F,P! Week In Review, Briefly #9

Also: key Up Wing and Down Wing news from the week that was

In case you missed it ...

✨ Would AGI be no big deal? (Tuesday)

🚀 NASA (and moonshot 2.0) is in meltdown mode (Wednesday)

⚛️ Regulators, not reactors, are the real nuclear risk (Thursday)

🤖 Thoughts of a (rare) free-market AI doomer: My chat (+transcript) with economist James Miller (Friday)

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✨ Would AGI be no big deal? (Oct. 21, 2025)

Bubble or boom? AI valuations are soaring, with a trillion dollars in paper gains among just ten unprofitable startups, fueling theories of an AI bubble. Yet the frenzy differs from the 1990s dot-com mania: Today’s Big Tech funders are cash-rich, not debt-ridden.

Steady as she goes. AI scientist Andrej Karpathy isn’t buying the “intelligence explosion” hype. On a recent podcast, he argued that even artificial general intelligence would simply extend the same long-run two percent annual growth trend that’s defined the modern economy — progress, yes, but not earth-shattering: “Even if artificial general intelligence eventually arrives, Karpathy expects its impact to ‘add up to the same exponential’ growth curve that has characterized the modern economy, not a discrete upward break in the data.”

The supernova scenario. Perhaps Karpathy isn’t giving AGI enough credit. Some futurity-focused Economists imagine an accelerated future — one where self-improving AI drives growth tenfold or more, turning compounding progress into a feedback loop of discovery:

In their simulations, reaching full AI automation within 20 years boosts growth roughly tenfold to about 18 percent a year. In a faster five-year scenario, output doubles every four years. If AI goes further — automating scientific discovery —the model predicts a “type II singularity” in which productivity, capital, and knowledge feed on one another in a self-reinforcing spiral. Output, in theory, could then double every few months.

Up Wing Upshot. Whether AGI is simply the next stepping stone of progress or a true technological miracle, I wouldn’t bet on “business as usual.”