---
title: 'The AI Future No One Wants to Talk About'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=zWQe2Fn--Eg'
video_id: 'zWQe2Fn--Eg'
date: 2026-06-28
duration_sec: 0
---

# The AI Future No One Wants to Talk About

> Source: [The AI Future No One Wants to Talk About](https://youtube.com/watch?v=zWQe2Fn--Eg)

## Summary

The video argues that the common vision of artificial superintelligence (ASI) as an affordable, widely accessible tool is a myth. Instead, the speaker predicts that ASI will become an extremely expensive, restricted resource controlled by a few corporations and governments, leading to a new era of inequality and dominance. The talk draws on historical parallels with industrialization and analyzes current technical trends to support this view.

### Key Points

- **The Myth of Democratized AI** [0:03] — The speaker argues that the idea of everyone getting a $50/month superintelligent assistant is false; the future will be one of restricted access and elite control.
- **Recent AI Developments as Indicators** [0:15] — Yann LeCun quit Meta due to dissatisfaction with AI strategy; the US government restricted Anthropic's model to US citizens; Grok allegedly helped launch missiles at Iran.
- **Historical Precedent for AI Dominance** [2:55] — The first nations or corporations to develop superintelligence will dominate economically, militarily, and intellectually, similar to how industrial powers colonized the world.
- **Shift to New AI Architectures** [5:36] — Current LLMs are a temporary phase; the trend is toward world models that learn continuously in simulated environments, requiring specialized hardware.
- **Hardware-Software Integration** [7:45] — Future AI will be increasingly interwoven with its hardware, making copying difficult and economically unfeasible, leading to a 'megabrain' architecture.
- **Economics of Super Brains** [9:03] — Building and running super brains will be extraordinarily expensive, leading to restricted access and a future where intelligence is a commodity for the wealthy.
- **Social and Political Consequences** [9:33] — The result will be a world where the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and most people cannot understand the decisions made by those controlling the AI.

## Transcript

So you think that once artificial super 
intelligence has arrived, you'll sign up for $50  
a month and henceforth live super intelligently 
like everyone else. It's not going to happen.  
And today I want to tell you why. The recent 
AI developments tell us a lot. Yann LeCun, the  
former chief AI scientist at Meta, quit because 
he was dissatisfied with Meta's AI strategy. He's  
now founded his own company. The US government 
demanded that Anthropic block access to its newest  
model, Fable, for all but US citizens, giving 
Anthropic the best press coverage they could have  
hoped for, entirely for free. And Grok supposedly 
helped the US government to launch missiles at  
Iran. I think all these developments tell us 
the trajectory we're on. At this point, what  
happens in artificial intelligence is basically 
baked into physical limitations and economic  
pressure. The software and hardware of machine 
brains will become increasingly linked. They'll  
become extremely expensive to use and maintain and 
access will become extremely restricted. We can  
already see the beginning of this. The future is 
not everyone gets a genius assistant. The future  
is your genius assistant is currently unavailable 
because billionaires using it to optimize tax  
avoidance. The artificially intelligent systems 
that we currently have are just about to become  
useful in some domains like coding and textbased 
tasks. They're still far away from humanlike  
general intelligence, but we'll get there. Maybe 
in a few years, and it won't stop there. Maybe  
in a decade we'll have machines that are much 
more intelligent than we are. either because  
the machines become more intelligent or we become 
dumber or all three. A lot has been said about the  
risks posed by artificial super intelligence 
because they might develop their own agenda.  
Indeed, they almost certainly will and then they 
will convince us that their cause is also ours  
which won't be all that difficult because it's 
what corporations have been doing for decades  
without any intelligence at all. But this is not 
the problem I want to talk about today. Instead,  
I want to talk about what super intelligence will 
mean socially and economically because that's what  
we'll have to deal with first. Think back 250 
years ago. The first nations to industrialize  
didn't just get richer. They held power over the 
rest of the world. Ahead of all was Great Britain,  
which basically started the wave of global 
industrialization already in the 18th century.  
They didn't invent colonalization, but they 
took it to an entirely new level. France and  
Germany followed their example decades later and 
grabbed what was left of the world. The same thing  
is about to happen with AI, not with ships and 
armies, but with software. The first entities,  
nations, or corporations to develop super 
intelligence will dominate everyone else  
economically, militarily, and intellectually. 
The Chinese understand that. The US government  
understands it. The rest of the world clearly 
does not, otherwise that stop throwing money at  
idiotic things like building bigger particle 
colliders. Sorry, I had to say it. It's how  
you know I'm me. More seriously, at this point in 
time, super intelligent AI is the only thing that  
matters. Whoever gets there first will literally 
rule the world. If you look at the AI models that  
we currently use, it's tempting to extrapolate 
into the future and conclude that we'll all get  
access to the newest models eventually. Yes, 
sure, there'll be some restrictions for safety  
reasons. Okay, but look, unless you want to breed 
a super virus to weed out all humans, that won't  
affect you. And if you do, well, you might 
want to consider a career change. And anyway,  
companies have strong commercial incentives to 
make their models widely available. But this  
is a temporary phase that won't continue. The 
current frontier models work in two different  
phases. The training that takes a long time and is 
expensive. Then the result of the training encoded  
in the weights that can be copied easily be widely 
deployed and be made available to everyone. These  
models are nowhere near being profitable, but 
you can reasonably hope that if they just become  
useful enough, they'll get there eventually. And 
I think they will. But to get there, access will  
dramatically change. To see what's likely coming 
next, let's look at what we know already. First,  
the training of these models takes a lot of 
money and requires a lot of computing power,  
meaning a lot of hardware in the form of chips 
and connectors and related equipment. The energy  
requirements are already a bottleneck that's been 
much discussed. Second, large language models  
have serious shortcomings. Most importantly, 
they don't learn continuously. You train them,  
then you roll out the update, then you train a new 
generation. The trend is going towards equipping  
these models with tools, giving them memory and 
adding all kinds of twiddles and thumbs. They also  
have a basically unfixable safety problem from 
prompt injection. It seems clear that eventually  
we'll see a switch to an entirely new basic 
architecture. Multiple companies like Nvidia  
and Google Deep Mind and Yann LeCun's new company 
are now working on what they call world models  
in which the artificial mind basically learns 
in an artificial environment not unlike humans  
did during evolution. That, so the hope, will teach 
them causal relations and and inference and will  
ultimately be the step to general intelligence. 
Another problem with large language models is that  
they suffer from what's been called catastrophic 
forgetting. They don't consolidate useful  
knowledge. They overwrite it. The human brain has 
solved this problem by specializing into different  
parts. In my case, one part does physics, one part 
does taxes and the rest is there to remember the  
cheese. And indeed the trend in large language 
models is already towards more specialization , 
to using task dedicated subsections of the 
architecture. These artificial brains borrow  
more and more properties from the human brain 
neurons, attention, memory, specialization and  
the trend is now towards continuous learning. 
Third, we also see an increasing specialization  
in hardware already. Google in particular has 
developed chips especially for AI training  
and multiple companies are working on what's been 
called neuromorphic chips that align the software  
purpose with the hardware design. The major reason 
is that this is faster and less energy intensive.  
Now let's put these things together. The economic 
pressure on artificial intelligence is clearly  
that it becomes less energy intensive and will 
require less components. Extrapolating the trend  
that we already see tells us that this will mean 
that hardware and software becomes increasingly  
interwoven not unlike in the human brain. The 
optimization pressure for artificial intelligence  
then becomes quite similar to the metabolic 
cost that put a pressure on human evolution.  
The thing is now though that the more the 
artificial intelligence becomes interwoven  
with its hardware and the bigger it becomes, 
the harder it'll become to copy it. It's not  
that this will become impossible, just difficult 
and slow and ultimately it'll stop making sense  
except for maybe the occasional backup. Where does 
this lead us? I think that the logical end point  
of this development is a megabrain architecture. 
one continuously running, continuously learning  
central model. And from this megabrain, 
developers will derive simplified child  
models for routine use to be deployed elsewhere 
to do the everyday work to take your jobs and then  
ask you to rate your experience. But don't worry, 
despair is free. By the way, this weekend we have  
a sale on our store with 25% off on pretty much 
everything, including this t-shirt, which shows  
the elements of the human body. Megabrains are 
a common narrative also in science fiction. And I  
think that's not a coincidence. It's what you get 
if you take into account that an artificial brain  
will be subject to similar environmental 
pressures as naturally developed brains.  
The real question is then what's the economics 
of the super brains? Building and running these  
super brains will be extraordinarily expensive. 
They'll need constant maintenance. There'll be  
few companies and maybe a few governments who will 
be able to do it. Access to them will be strongly  
restricted. Not only will you need some safety 
clearance for your questions, you'll also have to  
hand over a lot of money. It's a future in which 
intelligence is available only to those who can  
afford it. A bold new concept, also known as the 
past. The result of all this will almost certainly  
be that the rich will get richer and the poor 
will get poorer. But it's not just that. It also  
means that we'll increasingly live in a world in 
which we simply can't understand what's happening,  
how or why. new materials, new technologies, new 
drugs, new weapons, and new rules about using  
them that we can't understand with decisions being 
made by those in charge of the mega brains if they  
remain in charge. There'll be some fractions 
of people who just refuse to accept this and  
instead insist on living in low tech AI free 
communities. But for most of us, that's what  
the future will likely bring. artificial super 
intelligence owned by the few used to rule the  
many. And we can finally work on our ultimate 
skill, artificial understanding. Another imminent  
issue with artificial intelligence is the rapid 
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you. Thanks for watching. See you around.