The "Killer app" for AGI/ASI is, I suspect, going to be in robotics, even more so than in replacing "white collar workers".
That includes, beyond literal Killers, all kinds of manufacturing, construction and service work.
I would expect a LOT of funds to go into research all sorts of actuators, artificial muscles and any other technology that will be useful in building better robots.
Companies that can get and maintain a lead in such technologies may reach a position similar to what US Steel had in the 19th century.
That could be the next nvidia.
I would not be at all surprised if we will have a robot in the house in 10 years that can clean and do the dishes, and that is built using basically the same parts as the robots that replace our soldiers and the police.
I would expect a LOT of funds to go into research all sorts of actuators, artificial muscles and any other technology that will be useful in building better robots.
If you had an ASI? I don’t think you’d need a lot of funds to go into this area anymore ? Presumably it would all be solved overnight.
Once we have godlike tier ASI, you're probably right. But I expect that robots could become extremely lucrative even when avaiable AI's haven't reached that point yet.
Companies that have a head start at that point, may get a huge first-mover advantage. Also, those companies also very well may have the capability to leverage AI in product development, just like everyone else.
And just as important as the products themselves is the manufacturing capacity to build them at scale. Until we have massive numbers of robots in service, building such infrastructure is likely to be slow and expensive.
EDIT: Also, once we really have the kind of Godlike ASI you envision, no human actions really matter (economically) anymore.
its possible. Right now ai + robotics has been a big area of research for a while, and its very good at some tasks, see basically everything boston dynamics does wrt dynamically balancing. They help alongside control systems very well. However for multimodal task planning its not there. A year or two back I wrote a long comment about it but basically there is this idea of "grounding", basically connecting computer vision, object symbols/concepts, and task planning, which remains elusive. Its a similar problem with self driving cars - you want to be able to reason very strongly about things like "place all of the screws into the red holes" in a way that maps automatically to the actions for those things
Yes. As you say, a lot of the limitations so far has been the control part, which is basically AI.
Given the pace that AI is currently moving at, it seems to me that more and more, the mechanical aspect is becoming the limitation.
GPT 4o now seems to be quite good at reasoning about the world from pictures in real time. I would expect it would soon become easy for it to do the high level part of many practical tasks, from housekeeping to manufacturing or construction. (And of course military tasks.)
This leaves the direct low-level actuator control to execute such tasks in detail. But even there, development has been immense. See for instance these soccer playing robots [1]
And as both high level and low level control (if we assume that models soon will add agentic features directly into the neural networks), the only missing peace is the ability to build mechanically capable and reliable robots at a low enough price that they become cheaper than humans for various kinds of work.
There is one more limitation, of course, which is that GPT 4o still requires a constant connection to a data center, and that the models is too large to run within a device or machine.
This is also one of the most critical limitations of self driving. Had the AI within a Tesla had the same amount of compute available as GPT-4o, it should be massively more capable.
That includes, beyond literal Killers, all kinds of manufacturing, construction and service work.
I would expect a LOT of funds to go into research all sorts of actuators, artificial muscles and any other technology that will be useful in building better robots.
Companies that can get and maintain a lead in such technologies may reach a position similar to what US Steel had in the 19th century.
That could be the next nvidia.
I would not be at all surprised if we will have a robot in the house in 10 years that can clean and do the dishes, and that is built using basically the same parts as the robots that replace our soldiers and the police.
Who will ultimately control them, though?