Prediction · economics & deployment
The trillion-scale AI boom: 'pretty darn prohibited'
Predicted in 2021 from takeoff debate with Paul Christiano, Nov 2021
“this all sure does sound "pretty darn prohibited" on my model, but I'd hope there'd be something earlier than that we could bet on.”
Resolution
falsified by events. The prediction was resolved as falsified by events in 2025.
Hyperscaler AI capex ≈ $400B/yr, Nvidia ≈ $4T, fabs a macro
story. The 'prohibited' world arrived. Doom did not.
Timeline
- Prediction made
- 2021
- Resolution date
- 2025
- Chapter
- Chapter 05: MIRI: Research
- Verdict
- falsified by events
Context and outcome
“This” referred to Christiano’s picture of the years before an intelligence explosion: hundreds of billions of dollars spent automating AI research, semiconductor production expanding on an enormous scale, and speculative valuations directing a significant share of world investment toward AI. Yudkowsky said that such a world sounded “pretty darn prohibited” on his model.
Most of that picture has since become ordinary news. Capital spending by the largest technology companies reached roughly $410 billion in 2025 and was projected to exceed $700 billion in 2026, driven heavily by AI infrastructure. Nvidia closed above a $4 trillion valuation in July 2025, while funding rounds for frontier laboratories grew into tens of billions of dollars.
Supporting receipts
“so a thing which Eliezer's Prophecy does not mandate per se, but sure does permit, and is on the mainline especially for nearer timelines, is that the world-ending prototype had no prior prototype containing 90% of the technology which earned a trillion dollars. a lot of Paul's Prophecy seems to be about forbidding this. is that a fair way to describe your own Prophecy?”
The mainline explicitly permits no trillion-dollar commercial precursor. Today's frontier products are exactly that precursor.
“stuff that we could see then: self-driving cars (10 years is enough for regulatory approval in many countries), super Codex, GPT-6 powered anime waifus being an increasingly loud source of (arguably justified) moral panic and a hundred-billion-dollar industry”
His conditional sketch of a no-AGI 2031, delivered as a reductio, is arriving partially on schedule.