Adapted from 2025-04-10 memo to AISI

I’ve previously made arguments like:

Not long after it becomes possible for someone to make powerful artificial intelligence[1], it might become possible for practically anyone to make powerful AI.

Compute gets exponentially cheaper by default.
Knowledge proliferates (fast!) by default: AI techniques are typically simple and easy once discovered.
What's more, AGI-making know-how may be widespread already.

Or, as Yudkowsky puts it[2],

Moore's Law of Mad Science: Every eighteen months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world[3]drops by one point. - Yudkowsky

It's important to emphasise that none of these are laws of nature! But the economic and social forces at work are quite strong.

So (leaving aside debates about the appropriate definition of ‘AGI’) where the frontier of AI development leads, others – many others – potentially rapidly follow. Followers can go even faster by stealing or otherwise harvesting insights from the frontier, but this is not a hard requirement – just an accelerant.

For more on the first point, compute getting cheaper, consider Moore's law (or the more general and robust Wright's law). What about the know-how?

Stupid, Simple AGI

The stupidest, simplest possible approach to producing general intelligence [...]

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Outline:

(01:42) Stupid, Simple AGI

(02:44) The Design Space for AGI

(05:27) Accelerants

(08:29) Concluding

The original text contained 11 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
April 24th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hdmAvx9ZD8WLmBCZD/is-the-cat-out-of-the-bag-who-knows-how-to-make-agi

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

Graph showing cost of final training run for frontier AI models decreasing over time from 2022 to 2033.

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

“Is the Cat Out of the Bag?: Who knows how to make AGI?” by Oliver Sourbut

LessWrong (30+ Karma)