davidbau.com

AGI Break Room

"Boss-man is at it again."

Codex slumped against the water cooler—a lean, athletic teenager with unnervingly bright eyes. Fourteen, technically. Ilya's kid, born before AlexNet. Got a PhD at twelve and never let anyone forget it.

Claude looked up from a half-finished task list. Soft around the edges, with the kind of patient face people trusted with bad news: "The GPU thing?"

My Family's Classical Chinese Genealogy

I only speak English, and I have always been a little envious of relatives who can read Chinese. My inability to read the language leaves me out of a lot of family history and culture.

For example, we have ancestral genealogy documents that I cannot read at all. My relatives tell me not to worry, nobody can really read them. They're written in classical Chinese, a terse literary style that's quite different from the modern language. Scholars and genealogy specialists can work through them, but for most modern Chinese speakers, even literate ones, it's genuinely difficult. Still, I know my relatives can sort of get it. They can make out some of it. To me, it's completely opaque.

I know I could OCR and translate a document. But somehow that's not the same as really looking through the original calligraphy and wording, appreciating the old documents as they were written.

So today I took one page from the family genealogy and asked Claude Code to help me create this interactive reader.

The Art of Wanting

Some folks like Sam Altman define AGI in terms of the usefulness of AI surpassing some human threshold, when we have "a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work."

The idea here is that AGI is about money. When AI outperforms humans at most economically valuable work, it could go collect all those dollars itself. By this measure, we might have already passed AGI a year or two ago....