🔮 Exponential View #565: Autoresearch; the solar supercycle; an agentic nation; ChatGPT Olympian, seeing fraud & moving asteroids++

An insider’s perspective on AI and exponential technologies

This post originally appeared in Exponential View and was written by Azeem Azhar and Nathan Warren.

“The top 5–10% of builders using AI coding tools are now 3–5x more productive than a year ago because they orchestrate fleets of agents to code for them.”

Radical optimism

In the week when oil crossed $100 a barrel and triggered the biggest oil shock in history, we published a radically optimistic analysis of the near future of energy. The world right now may feel like a place where the short run is gorging on the long run – and yet! there are forces that no political decision can eclipse.

We argue that solar power could unlock a cascade of civilizational problems that cheap electricity can solve. Solar energy enjoys learning curves, cheaper with scale, while fossil fuels, for all their remarkable properties, face depletion curves.

At three cents per kilowatt-hour, desalination will no longer be a luxury and water scarcity will stop being “a law of nature”. At one cent, carbon capture will approach economic viability and synthetic aviation fuel will close on fossil jet fuel.