The Silicon Valley Prophet’s New Clothes: Sam Altman’s AGI Growth Story
“Remember those late-night infomercials where enthusiastic hosts promised miracle products that would change your life forever? Sam Altman’s recent blog post about AGI feels eerily similar, except instead of a revolutionary potato peeler, he’s selling us the techno-equivalent of “money printer goes brrr” – but with AI doing the printing.
Let’s decode what’s really happening here. Altman’s post reads like a startup narrative building, carefully crafted to make investors’ eyes glaze over with dollar signs. It’s the tech equivalent of “This time it’s different” – the four most expensive words in investing history, now with added neural networks.
First, let’s talk about his magical logarithmic scaling law. According to Altman, you can just keep throwing money at AI and – poof! – it gets smarter, like a digital Pokémon that evolves with every billion dollars fed into it. This is the equivalent of saying, “Trust me, bro, the laws of physics and economics don’t apply to us.” It’s a beautiful story for investors: predictable returns, infinite scaling, no ceiling in sight. If this reminds you of certain cryptocurrency pitches, well… you’re not alone.
Then comes the pièce de résistance: the claim that AI costs are dropping 10x every 12 months. Let’s put this in perspective: if this were true, by 2030, running an AI as powerful as GPT-4 would cost less than buying a cup of coffee. By 2035, it would be cheaper than the air you breathe [1].
This is the kind of math that would make even crypto bros blush. It’s the financial equivalent of saying, “This rocket ship runs on hopes and dreams, and we’ve got an infinite supply!”
But wait, there’s more! Altman throws in the “super-exponential” value claim – essentially arguing that AI will create an economic perpetual motion machine. It’s like promising that not only will your investment grow, it will grow faster than exponentially. This is the kind of statement that would make traditional investors spill their morning coffee, but in the frothy world of AI funding, it’s just another Monday morning.
The post then pivots to comparing AI to transistors, which is like comparing a quantum computer to a toaster because they both use electricity. Sure, transistors revolutionized the world, but they didn’t claim to be able to replace human creativity, decision-making, and consciousness. They just sat there, reliably switching on and off, like good little semiconductors should.
The most telling part is how Altman frames the future workforce transformation. He describes AI agents as “virtual co-workers” – a lovely euphemism that sounds much better than “replacement workers who never ask for raises, healthcare, or bathroom breaks.”
What makes this particularly clever is how it’s all wrapped in a veneer of technological inevitability. The message is clear: This train is leaving the station, and you better be on it (preferably as an investor in OpenAI) or you’ll be left behind in the digital dust. It’s FOMO weaponized with a PhD in computer science.
The grand finale is a masterful hedge: suggesting that society needs to “co-evolve” with the technology. This is corporate-speak for “if something goes wrong, it’s society’s fault for not evolving fast enough,” not the technology’s fault for being rushed to market faster than you can say “unaligned AI.”
Don’t get me wrong – AI is genuinely transformative technology, but the real genius here isn’t in the technology claims – it’s in the narrative construction. It’s a story designed to make missing out seem like the biggest risk, while actual risks are relegated to footnotes about governance and safety. It’s the kind of pitch that makes investors fear being the only one not in on the next big thing.
In the end, Altman’s post is less about AGI and more about FOMO. It’s a masterclass in modern tech storytelling, where the future is always bright, the scaling is always infinite, and the returns are always super-exponential. Just don’t ask too many questions about the details – that would spoil the magic.
As they say in Silicon Valley: If you can’t make it, fake it until you make it. Or in this case, until you can raise another funding round.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] Let me break down this calculation. Let’s start with estimated current costs and apply the 10x reduction annually.
Let’s say current cost of running GPT-4 level AI (2024) is approximately $1 per substantial interaction.
With 10x reduction every 12 months:
2024: $1.00
2025: $0.10
2026: $0.01
2027: $0.001 (0.1 cents)
2028: $0.0001 (0.01 cents)
2029: $0.00001 (0.001 cents)
2030: $0.000001 (0.0001 cents)
2031: $0.0000001
2032: $0.00000001
2033: $0.000000001
2034: $0.0000000001
2035: $0.00000000001
For reference:
– Average cup of coffee: $3-5
– Cost reaches coffee price around 2026
– By 2030, cost would be millionths of a cent
– By 2035, cost would be one hundred-billionth of a cent
This shows the absurdity of maintaining a 10x annual reduction – it quickly reaches physically impossible levels given energy costs alone. Even if we assume the initial cost estimate is off by orders of magnitude, the fundamental problem of exponential decrease remains.
The energy cost of computation has fundamental physical limits (Landauer’s principle), making such continuous exponential decreases impossible. This makes Altman’s projection either:
- A short-term observation incorrectly extrapolated
- An oversimplified marketing claim
- A misunderstanding of long-term technological constraints
Author: Legal Counsel Robert Nogacki: Founder and Managing Partner of Skarbiec Law Firm, recognized by Dziennik Gazeta Prawna as one of the best tax advisory firms in Poland (2023, 2024). Legal advisor with 19 years of experience, serving Forbes-listed entrepreneurs and innovative start-ups. One of the most frequently quoted experts on commercial and tax law in the Polish media, regularly publishing in Rzeczpospolita, Gazeta Wyborcza, and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna. Author of the publication “AI Decoding Satoshi Nakamoto. Artificial Intelligence on the Trail of Bitcoin’s Creator” and co-author of the award-winning book “Bezpieczeństwo współczesnej firmy” (Security of a Modern Company). LinkedIn profile: 17,000 followers, 4 million views per year. Awards: 4-time winner of the European Medal, Golden Statuette of the Polish Business Leader, title of “International Tax Planning Law Firm of the Year in Poland.” He specializes in strategic legal consulting, tax planning, and crisis management for business.
Robert Nogacki is a Polish attorney at law (radca prawny), the founder and managing partner of Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec (Skarbiec Law Firm), which has operated continuously since 2006.
The law is equal for everyone, but the parties rarely are: on one side stands an organization with time, money, and lawyers, on the other a person with one business, one nest egg, and one life.
Clients rarely come to him with a legal problem. They come with a problem that also has a legal side: an audit that began with a single invoice, money entrusted to someone who has disappeared, a company that has to be passed on before it is too late. Most such matters are decided long before the first letter is written, in decisions made without asking and in deadlines nobody remembered. So he begins by asking how the client got here, not what the client should have done.
He advises entrepreneurs and families from more than a dozen countries, including those whose accounts the tax office has just seized and who do not know what to do tomorrow morning. He defends them in tax audits, customs and fiscal inspections, disputes with the tax authorities, and criminal tax proceedings. He represents victims of investment fraud and Ponzi schemes. He helps families set up family foundations and plan succession, so that a life’s work outlasts a single generation.
Not every case can be won. Every case can be run so that the client knows where they stand. Since 2006 he has represented the victims in the WGI case (Warszawska Grupa Inwestycyjna, the Warsaw Investment Group), one of the longest criminal cases in the history of the Polish financial market, because some things must not be left half finished, even when they take two decades. In the case of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange Zonda (Zondacrypto, operated by BB Trade Estonia OÜ), he represents several hundred victims in the criminal investigation conducted by Poland’s National Prosecutor’s Office and in the Estonian bankruptcy proceedings.
Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec is listed in the rankings of Poland’s largest tax advisory firms published by Dziennik Gazeta Prawna and Rzeczpospolita, and it is a four-time recipient (2015 to 2018) of the European Medal awarded by the Business Centre Club and the European Economic and Social Committee. Robert Nogacki publishes regularly, in the press and on the firm’s website, for people who have a problem rather than a law degree, because a legal opinion the client cannot understand protects only the lawyer.
He believes that the best legal advice is the kind that means the client never has to appear in court.
