Let’s imagine for a second that the impressive pace of AI progress over the past few years continues for a few more.

In that time period, we’ve gone from AIs that could produce a few reasonable sentences to AIs that can produce full think tank reports of reasonable quality; from AIs that couldn’t write code to AIs that can write mediocre code on a small code base; from AIs that could produce surreal, absurdist images to AIs that can produce convincing fake short video and audio clips on any topic.

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Companies are pouring billions of dollars and tons of talent into making these models better at what they do. So where might that take us?

Imagine that later this year, some company decides to double down on one of the most economically valuable uses of AI: improving AI research. The company designs a bigger, better model, which is carefully tailored for the super-expensive yet super-valuable task of training other AI models.

With this AI trainer’s help, the company pulls ahead of its competitors, releasing AIs in 2026 that work reasonably well on a wide range of tasks and that essentially function as an “employee” you can........

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