Garry Tan: Own Your Intelligence

So what did he actually say that was worth deleting a man over? The gist of the heresy was that God is not a king on a throne.

God is spread through everything that exists.

"God or nature," he wrote.

400 years later, we are making a similar mistake about intelligence.

Everyone is waiting for AGI as a singular event, a God in a data center.

Some announcement, some threshold, some day when the sky changes color.

So now I'll say a version of Spinoza's heresy updated 400 years later.

Everyone is watching the sky, and the thing they're watching for is already in the room.

It doesn't look like a god.

It looks like infrastructure, a terminal window, a folder of markdown files, a job that finishes while you sleep, spread through everything, which is exactly where Spinoza told you to look.

AGI isn't arriving as an event.

It's arriving diffused as your agent running on your context, doing your work I call it personal AGI, not artificial general intelligence for everyone all at once, general intelligence for one person, you.

This was a dream of a great many people.

Vannevar Bush called it the Memex, a machine that would be an extension of yourself and your brain.

And I want to be precise about what I mean, because the words personal AI has already been captured by marketing departments.

I do not mean a chatbot you pay twenty dollars a month to.

I do not mean a slightly better autocomplete.

I do not mean an assistant that knows your calendar and nothing else.

That's just a subscription you rent.

It's a corporate AGI you don't own.

It resets when you close the tab.

It knows what everyone else already knows.

And when the company behind it pivots, your so-called assistant gets a lobotomy on someone else's schedule.

Personal AGI is a different animal.

An agent that runs on your infrastructure, reads from a memory you own, executes procedures you wrote, and compounds.