(2026-08-05) ZviM The Three AI Pills

Zvi Mowshowitz: The Three AI Pills. Sincere disagreements about AI are usually disagreements about future AI capabilities. There are roughly four positions people take. Two are reasonable. Two are not.

I distinguish these via the Three AI Pills. You can take zero, one, two or three.

The three pills are, roughly, taking each of the following three things seriously:

• AI pilled. AI exists and can do the things it can already do.
• AGI pilled. AI will be able to do a lot more of the things.
• ASI pilled. AI will be able to do approximately all the things better than you, within our natural lifetimes.

I am ASI pilled. A large percentage of employees of the frontier labs are ASI pilled. The labs themselves are ASI pilled.

The majority of people have not taken the first pill.

Most people have no idea what frontier AIs can do for them. They are unaware of coding agents.

They dismiss AI as worthless because it pointed them to a closed store or recommended the wrong number of pizzas.

They often still talk about ‘stochastic parrots

Some versions of this are wrong. Some are Not Even Wrong. None are reasonable.

The AI Pill

Even fully taking the first AI pill is a big deal.

So many things that you used to do by hand, or some other way, are now better done by typing a quick request into a text box.
So many things that previously were not worth doing are now worth doing.

Most economists, and most people who work in policy and government, have taken at most this first pill, and underestimate even the impacts of the first pill alone.

They see AI as ‘uncompetitive’ without realizing the situation is temporary.

Even if AI could permanently only do the things it can currently do, that would be Internet big, and radically change the world, mostly for the better. ((2024-09-30) ZviM AI And The Technological Richter Scale)

AI capabilities will not permanently stop here. It is wrong to not take the second pill.

Our debates about AI remain largely stuck on settled questions, because so many people cannot even take the first pill.

Stuck At The First Pill

To have good discussions, we need to at least take the second pill.

The AGI Pill

*The AGI pill is a much bigger deal than the AI pill.

If you take the AGI pill, you understand that AI is advancing its capabilities rapidly.*

You see that we will face times of great transition and uncertainty, that have the potential to go extremely badly, and that those who succeed at AI will leave those who do not behind in the dust.

Lots of current jobs will go away, whether or not they are replaced by new and potentially better ones. Economic growth and productivity will accelerate

You see some of the dangers of what would happen if we empowered misuse of such advanced AI systems before we were ready, especially in places like cyber and bio risk.

You see the potential for centralization of power, or inequality, and also for some forms of runaway gradual disempowerment.

You understand that our legal and regulatory regimes are not ready

The Need To Be Prepared

Those who expect AI to quickly become sufficiently advanced to greatly impact the physical world usually see great danger. They notice that as a result everyone may soon die. Usually they think this is bad, actually.

For different values of ‘sufficiently advanced,’ as in AGI versus ASI, you would see different degrees of danger.

The AGI pill is still sufficient for most things in the Overton window or under serious consideration as of August 2026.

There is no good case for not doing radically more investment in alignment, infrastructure and oversight, state capacity, transparency, liability, disclosures, safety testing including of internal models, red teaming, auditing, enforcement of export controls and laying the groundwork for diplomacy.
This includes laying the groundwork to Pace the Frontier should that prove necessary

If you are fully ASI pilled, and realistic about the current state of alignment and how superintelligence likely plays out if it arrives soon, then you will want to go further. You will want to do things that have real downsides, and require real tradeoffs.

Some such people want to do a full international pause of frontier AI development

The ASI Pill

The ASI pill is the understanding that AI is on pace to be able to do approximately all of the things better than you.

There are some things that inherently require or greatly benefit from being a human.

It does not mean omnipotence or omniscience, although one should expect it to look a lot like that to an unaided human.

It does mean that those who rely more on such AIs will reliably outcompete, in all senses including for resources, those that rely on such AIs less.

It means realizing that intelligence does not stop anywhere near the human level

It also means not pretending that its superior intellect can be matched by your puny weapons, or your pieces of ink on paper, or your entries in a database, or your regulatory capture and rent seeking.

And Then Nothing Much Changes For You

Despite all that, the sign of the AGI pill, as opposed to the ASI pill, is the belief that day to day life will continue to look similar to how it looks now.
Sometimes this is clearly disingenuous, as it is coming from someone ASI pilled enough to know better. I read Sam Altman saying various forms of ‘life will not much change after the singularity’ as basically unjustified Obvious Nonsense to reassure his audiences

Others sometimes do have something more concrete in mind as their vision of the future, and why it will not change so much, with varying degrees of coherence.

Those with only the AGI pill believe in bottlenecks that hold back change.
They often believe that our ability to exponentially grow AI’s capacity and capabilities will hit various physical limits.

They often believe there is not that much left to physically discover, in the classic ‘close the patent office’ kind of way, even in theory

Intelligence Denialism

I sometimes call this Intelligence Denialism: The idea that being smarter is not all that, no matter how smart one gets. That there is this thing, intelligence, that you either have or don’t have, and that minds cap out.

Often this extends to denying that more intelligent humans can do and accomplish the things they clearly do and accomplish

This is, usually, the central good reason people who are AGI pilled do not take the ASI pill. They are unable to understand that superintelligence is a thing.

Superintelligence Versus Omniscience and Omnipotence

A common error is to think that anything superintelligent would be omniscient or even omnipotent, and therefore superintelligence is impossible.
Whereas, again, there is a lot of ‘space above humans’ without becoming omni.

Persuasion Persuasion (A Worked Example)

At most one can claim some particular capability, typically very effective persuasion (often ‘super-persuasion’), would not be possible. Indeed, a common argument states that even an idealized AI would be unable to be superior to the best human persuader, or even a typical good human persuader

Often this is done by citing that context matters for persuasion. Many talk as if this context would trump everything, despite this not being true for humans. They also believe that highly capable AIs could not engineer favorable contexts.

I flat out cannot understand why someone would think advanced AIs will remain relatively unpersuasive

Yet I am not a superhuman persuader, so many find my arguments unconvincing.

And like, worst case, the AI gets an earpiece and tells a human what to do

Another way of thinking about this:
Adrien Ecoffet: Could a superpersuasive AI get a high speed rail line between SF and LA constructed for under $50B and under 10 years with existing construction technology?
Dean Ball: No

My answer, for a sufficiently persuasive AI is essentially: Yes, but not without incidentally taking over at least the California government. Instrumental convergence.

An example that is almost too perfect an example of ‘you will never be able to do [thing that you can already do]’:
Ramez Naam: “No matter how high quality your tokens are, they cannot turn lead into gold.”

We already have successfully turned lead into gold in 2025, it’s just cost prohibitive with current methods

Things AI Could Probably Do But Are Not Required For Being Pilled

Could such an AI send off an order to a bio lab and end up with programmed self-replicating diamond nanoprobes? Could it do so without any physical experiments, based purely on simulations?

No one knows where the physical limits lie, either for the end of full RSI (recursive self-improvement) or for where the current cycles might top off in practice

I mostly stopped talking about those possibilities, despite them seeming rather likely to me, because:
When you mention such things, people attack that claim, and use it as a reason to dismiss your entire argument

You don’t need such claims to get the same results

Another approach is this, which works for some but I do not expect it to be at all persuasive to Timothy Lee:
Jack Gallagher: the intuition that made it click for me was thinking of it less in terms of “intelligence” and more in terms of things like metr time horizons. a lot of work is intelligence x schlep gated and as you improve on those axes just about everything eventually falls. maybe you still miss some grand creative spark but nanotech doesn’t require a creative spark from here it requires relentless grinding on miniaturization.

Life Comes At You Increasingly Fast

Another reason people stop at the AGI pill is not understanding, or rejecting out of hand as too sci-fi or weird or absurd or what not, the idea of recursive self-improvement, or a singularity, or that things might be radically accelerating.

They can accept that things are speeding up, but not that the speeding up is itself speeding up, and so on, which indeed is already happening and hard to miss.
This has in some sense been happening for a very long time.
That is how exponentials work. Nothing centrally new happens, and yet kaboom.

Is It Reasonable To Not Be AGI Pilled?

No.
If you are not AGI pilled, your reactions to AI will not be wise or prudent. Alas, much of our policy and conversation is being driven by people who are not AGI pilled.

Is It Reasonable To Only Be AGI Pilled?

Yes, if you seriously grapple with its implications, and know what your cruxes are.
I think it is wrong. But it is a coherent position

If you do believe the AGI-only position, I have two requests.

• First, seriously tackle the implications of what you do think AI is going to be able to do, without flinching, and without trying to assume everything magically works out and somehow people’s life experiences do not much change
• Second, write down what are your cruxes that are stopping you from taking the ASI pill. In particular, write down (in the comments here would be great) what is the least surprising or impressive thing an AI will never be able to do, or that would change your mind about where this is going.