Probably the biggest recent news was the Phil Trammell and Dwarkesh Patel paper on Capital in the 22nd Century, which provoked many many reactions. I am going to conspicuously not dig into it because of the sheer volume of thoughtful commentary floating around, but I do recommend at least skimming Zvi's summary.

Instead I’ll mostly be responding to real-world events, like inference cost trends and the rise of AI Jesus. Buckle up!

(Crossposted on Substack if that's more your thing)

Transformative Economics and AI Polytheism

We’ve finally started publishing talks from the December Post-AGI workshop, and I really highly recommend them — so far it's just the first two keynotes.

Anton Korinek's talk is, in my opinion, the best half-hour overview of transformative AI economics. He dispels a lot of myths, like that there must always be new jobs, and provides some helpful reframings, like thinking in terms of relative price rather than simply observing that some specific resource will become cheaper or more expensive. (Talk, Transcript, Tweets)

Beren Millige's talk is quite bizarre. His central topic is “AI polytheism”: what happens if there are many godlike AIs floating around? One point I found particularly surprising and yet obvious [...]

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Outline:

(00:42) Transformative Economics and AI Polytheism

(01:52) Automated Research

(04:32) The politics of measurement

(05:26) Do inference costs grow faster than agent time horizons?

(07:33) The Race for AI Jesus

(08:23) JPMorgan Replaces the Advisors

(09:32) Benevolent Monopolists?

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First published:
January 14th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nuBpHMynQhxrJjdkv/gd-roundup-4-inference-monopolies-and-ai-jesus

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

Graph showing agent performance on HCAST and RE-Bench benchmarks by cost at 50% time horizon.

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“GD Roundup #4 - inference, monopolies, and AI Jesus” by Raymond Douglas

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“GD Roundup #4 - inference, monopolies, and AI Jesus” by Raymond Douglas