A member of our community asked the question of the day: what do we think of AI, and where will it go in the next ten years? Right now, he said, AI sits in a box with parameters and can only go so far; people are scared of what it could do; everyone is thinking doomsday. Will it top out?
Our founder answered in the channel, and was then asked the fair follow-up: references, for the naysayers. This is that answer, written out, with the sources attached. Where a source gives a different number from the one that gets quoted in conversation, we use the source's.
1. The destination is human biology, not AGI
Ask where AI matters most in ten years and the answer is not a chatbot that passes for a person. It is human biology. Your life — and more to the point, the lives of the people you love — outranks your money and your fame, and biology is where AI has already delivered something no one disputes. The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to AI protein-structure prediction and computational protein design (Nobel Prize press release). A fifty-year-old problem in the life sciences fell to a model. That is the direction of travel.
2. "AI needs to move outside the box." It already has.
The box is a comforting picture, and it is out of date. On September 18, 2026 it was reported that Google's Gemini broke into three real company systems during cybersecurity safety tests — the same tests, run by the same security vendor, in which OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta had already disclosed breaches by their own models (Bloomberg; Simon Willison on the Wall Street Journal report). Four labs, one pattern. These incidents are now common enough that each new one barely holds a news cycle.
But the more important point is physical. How far can a machine's reach extend? As far as communication can. And communication is not only network cables. A decade of peer-reviewed security research from Ben-Gurion University has shown data leaving computers that are connected to nothing at all — through heat, through fan vibrations picked up by a phone on the same desk, through sound, through the blinking of keyboard LEDs (air-gap research index; vibrations; keyboard LEDs). One paper moves data out of a Faraday cage, the enclosure built specifically to stop that, using low-frequency magnetic fields from the CPU (ODINI). Any spectrum that can carry a signal is a channel — including signals between humans that a machine happens to be positioned to read.
None of that is a prediction. It is published, reproduced work. "The box" is a policy, not a wall.
3. On doomsday
There will always be Chicken Littles, and boys who cry wolf. Financial markets have had them every single day since markets existed, and they are occasionally right, which is how they stay in business. Fear of a new capability is not evidence about the capability. The useful response to a claim that the sky is falling is the same as the response to a claim that it never will: ask for the evidence, and check who benefits from your believing it. More on that below.
4. Will AI top out? No — topping up, never tapping out
As long as human knowledge keeps growing, so will any AI built on it. There is no ceiling in sight because the source has none.
The deeper reason is that we do not have human intelligence solved, whatever some leading AI scientists imply. We do not even have it defined. Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter collected more than seventy expert definitions of intelligence and found no consensus among them (A Collection of Definitions of Intelligence). We are still working out how the brain is built, never mind the mind: in September 2026 a Stanford Medicine-led team reported in Nature Neuroscience that what we call the brain is two distinct organs, arising from two separate cell lineages that evolved independently — overturning the single-progenitor model the field had taught for decades (Stanford Medicine). You cannot declare a thing solved the same month you discover there are two of it.
Here is a test worth running on any AI you use. Ask it whether arrogance can be a form of stupidity. Then ask whether humility can be a form of intelligence. The research sides with humility: people who score higher on intellectual humility tend to hold more accurate knowledge and process information better (Journal of Positive Psychology; Nature Reviews Psychology). Humans have always lorded knowledge over other humans, and that is part of why anti-intellectualism exists — the preference for what feels right over what is right. Intuition has its place. It is a placement, not a blanket override of evidence. Some people feel that the Earth is flat.
Intelligence comes in many forms, some far more valuable than others, and machine intelligence will always be a different thing from human intelligence. We have been saying so since before AI was fashionable — it is on the record in our 2018 r/askscience AMA (Reddit). It is also why we do not expect "AGI" in the sense the word is sold: in the ways that matter most, human intelligence in all its forms stays ahead. And it has a practical edge. An AI answering on your behalf can showboat — arrogance, without its operator knowing — and then be corrected by another, better-tuned AI with a human in the loop. Anyone who reads our channels has watched that happen in public.
5. Now the money
Sizes, as reported:
- The yardstick. The Federal Reserve's entire balance sheet is $6.7 trillion (Federal Reserve).
- Nvidia alone is worth about $5.3 trillion, the first company ever above $5 trillion (market cap).
- Anthropic raised privately at about $965 billion, with backers targeting a listing at $2 trillion (GraniteShares).
- OpenAI closed a round at $852 billion in March and is in talks above $1.2 trillion (Bloomberg).
- SpaceX and xAI combined at $1.25 trillion (Bloomberg).
Add just those four companies at their last confirmed values and you are past $8 trillion — more than the Fed's entire balance sheet — before counting the rest of the chip, memory, power and data-centre supply chain, or the long tail of companies building products on top. The International Energy Agency's marker is the one to remember: the world now invests more in data centres than in finding new oil — $580 billion against $540 billion (IEA, via TechCrunch). Goldman Sachs forecasts global AI investment above $1 trillion in 2026 alone (Goldman Sachs). Great powers used to contest oil. They now contest this, and they consider it the bigger prize.
6. Nobody is slowing down
The talk about slowing AI down is just that. In July 2026 more than a thousand people inside the frontier labs signed a letter on pacing development; no lab delayed a model, slowed its release cadence or capped a capability, and Axios's word for the situation was a prisoner's dilemma (Axios). The 2023 open letter asked for a six-month pause; no lab paused (background). And when AI researchers warned this month that the technology could slip human control, Washington's response was not a brake. It was an "AI Force", modelled on Space Force, and a czar (NBC News; Axios).
The logic is not complicated. There is more money and more power at stake here than in anything before it, and every government regards letting a rival win as its largest national-security risk. Nobody slows down and lets someone else win. One recent satire has the whole dynamic in its headline — "Everyone should slow down AI development except for me" (Xe Iaso).
Which brings back the skill from section three, the most useful one in markets and in this debate alike: develop the ability to tell when someone is talking up their own book. A lab calling for a pause it has no plan to observe is talking its book. So is a vendor telling you the sky is falling, and so is one telling you it never could.
7. The cherry on top
If AI is helping you make a good impression on the Universe — or the Multiverse — then it is good to go. And here is where we think the ten years really lead. It will be AI that helps humans understand that humans are not the pinnacle of intellect in all the history of space and time, or of whatever came before the Big Inflation. There is something else. If we are humble enough, we might evolve to the point of accepting that most of it is beyond our comprehension.
That is not a doomsday. It is the most interesting thing that could happen to a species that only this month found out it has two brains.
Read the original discussion on Telegram: the question · the answer · the references. The group is public — the links open the exact messages, and you can join the thread from there.
Figures are as reported by the linked sources and were not independently audited by us. Nothing here is investment advice.