I’m sitting in a train across Austria and just listened to the Dario Amodei interview on Dwarkesh. He believes we’ll have the country of geniuses in a datacenter in 1-3 years. Working 24/7 on solving every single disease, and God knows what else.

I’ve been a believer in powerful tech for as long as I can really remember, and the singularity hasn’t happened yet (as far as I can tell), but right now it just feels different. Machines will be better at all work involving computers so damn soon.

And yet I’m on this train, where people barely manage to find their seat reservations, struggle with maneuvering their luggage through the crowded aisles and are generally complete unaware that anything big is coming at all. I suppose they play candy crush on their phones. Looking out the window, it’s the same picture. Tractors & agricultural machines that some dude drives across his acreage every year. Rundown business parks full of middle-age salespeople & their secretaries whose job it is to buy healthcare supplies cheaper than they sell them. Single family homes next to the rails with a soccer goal and two SUVs in the carport.

It will be so interesting to see how powerful this technology really is. Will any of this look different? Will the country of geniuses ever materially affect these lives? Or will it just deliver more candy to crush?