There's an interesting interview today between Tyler Cowen and a podcaster in Silicon Valley named Dwarkesh Patel. Patel has really been focused on the development of AI and is very tied in to what is happening at various big companies. He's interviewed most of the CEOs of these companies but he also has a network of friends who work at these companies. As a result, he has some real insight not only into what is happening now but what is coming next.
There's a lot in this interview, because it's pretty long, but I guess you could simplify it a bit by saying that Patel believes very big changes are coming to America's economy within the next four to five years. By the end of this decade, he believes AI minds will be comparable to human minds in terms of what they can do, except of course that they'll do it much faster. The other thing he sees coming is that those very smart AI minds will quickly outnumber us.
I think we’re a couple years away from systems that match humans across all cognitive domains and which vastly outnumber humanity and are thinking much faster. I think this will have a big impact on the world.
It’s very hard to think about what kind of impact it will have. Some of it is just inherently unpredictable, but trying to understand what is happening and articulate it seems like an important thing to do right now.
That's the big advantage of digital intelligence. You don't need to spend years feeding and developing a human mind, you can just copy and paste the new model as many times as your physical computing power allows. The danger is that, by its very nature, we're not entirely in control of what these advanced models think or the conclusions they reach.
My concern is that we’re going to be in a position within a matter of years where the population of A.I.s and their intelligence and their speed vastly outmatch humanity. And if they are as willing then as they are now to falsify evidence, try to tamper with and fool us, attack other institutions in society relevant to scoring well, attack their company developing them itself, which also happened in this situation, then I don’t know if that leads to a takeover, but I think it’s very plausible that it does.
The question of how close that danger is to us has a lot to do with the difference between the models we know about and have all seen and the ones that the AI companies themselves are currently tinkering with. Unfortunately, we don't have any direct access to those models so it's hard to judge how much more advanced they are and what they can do. But Patel has heard things that suggest the advances are happening very fast behind the scenes.
For example, maybe two days ago, I was talking to somebody at Anthropic, and they were like: Look, I expect A.I.s to beat humans at A.I. research within nine months.
And I’m like: Why do you believe that?
They’re like: It’s not just vibes, but I have information on the inside.
I’m like: What is it? Is it a new model? Is it some evaluation you ran?
He’s like: I can’t talk about it.
This is the entry point for the cycle everyone who says they are worried is most worried about. Once you have self-recursive models, AIs that program their own improvements, the speed of the improvement could be dramatically greater than anything we've seen so far. Imagine a future starting next year where new models can be released every month instead of every six months but with the same dramatic increases in capabilities each time. At that pace, it doesn't take long before it's hard to even keep up.
Later on the question of sentience comes up and Cowen frames this as a question about how common "AI psychosis" is in Silicon Valley. In other words, how many people there think the AI might be self-aware. This leads to an interesting diversion about how we could even know.
Patel: I don’t have a strong opinion either way on this. It’s not obvious to me that they’re not sentient. They seem to have a lot of the functional analogs of sentience. Of course, we don’t know how sentience works or even how to define it well. This is a famous problem — the hard problem of consciousness.
But if you look at their mental structures, they do have correlates for emotion, correlates for a global work space.
Cowen: But correlates — there’s no biological substratum to actually feel this stuff. If I call them a glorified cash register, why is that wrong?
Patel: I don’t know. They might be a glorified cash register. If you assume that you need a biological substrate to have sentience, then yeah, I agree. That would kind of be ridiculous.
Cowen: But everything that’s sentient that we know of — like my dog — has a biological substrate, right?
Patel: Until recently, everything we knew of that was intelligent had a biological substrate...
I think it’s possible that it could be that you have to be a biological thing. That even if you have an exact digital copy of me, that thing is not conscious. I think there’s some good chance that that’s true, and some chance that that’s not true.
This is getting into the weeds a bit, but Cowen seems to be arguing backwards a bit from an unpleasant moral conundrum. If there's even a small chance that some of these models replicate consciousness, should we really be treating them like machines? Wouldn't the people working with them all quit if they believed that? Patel has a pretty good answer for that one.
I think people are actually very bad at being coherent around sentient creatures. You see this especially clearly with factory farming. If you think biological substrates are capable of suffering, there’s a pretty robust case that we have 100 billion animals that are suffering a great deal in the world today.
Most people don’t change their behavior that much around that fact. So it’s not that surprising that when it comes to potentially conscious digital minds, that they wouldn’t change their behavior.
He's exactly right. Most people think of cows and chickens as living things with some rudimentary intelligence and even (in the case of cows) some potential for emotional behavior. And yet, most people aren't vegetarians.
The issue of abortion doesn't come up in this discussion but it's an even more obvious comparison. Unlike cows, we know for certain that an unborn child has all of the hardware to become a fully self-aware being no different from ourselves. And that doesn't stop millions of people from having abortions every year and hundreds of millions more from condoning it.
All that to say, if we found out tomorrow that AIs had signs of consciousness (and for the record I don't believe that's true thus far) I assume most people wouldn't care and would still just be wondering what AI can do for them.
Self-awareness aside, it won't be long before these other types of minds outnumber us.
The basic argument is that, by the end of the decade, digital minds will outnumber human biological minds.
They’ll be thinking a lot faster. They will have filled these cognitive gaps, partly because we’ll have automated A.I. research by then. At that point, there will also be very fast progress in robotics.
So I’m painting a picture of a world where within a matter of five to 10 years, both digital and physical A.I.s outnumber humans.
He could be completely wrong about all of this but, as I said up front, this is someone who is talking to insiders at these companies every day. He's probably closer to being right than most normie Americans can imagine at this moment in 2026.
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