inference-economics
2 articles
- Economic AGI Is a Factor-Substitution Threshold
Economic AGI is not a singularity or an ontological state — it is a factor-substitution threshold. Frontier models have crossed expert parity on standardized professional work at a fraction of human cost, and the threshold has been crossed for low-tail functions like customer support and content production. The remaining gap is autonomy, reliability, integration, and liability — not raw reasoning.
- The AI Empirical Grounding Bottleneck
Open-weight foundation models have collapsed the intelligence generation layer to near-zero marginal cost. The structural bottleneck is migrating to the verification layer — where search engines, financial data aggregators, and content publishers are converting their historical indexing moats into paid API tollbooths. This is not a single monopoly rent; it is a fragmented patchwork of metered, unevenly-priced access gates whose integration complexity is the real constraint.