# The trillion-scale AI boom: 'pretty darn prohibited'

> 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.

Canonical URL: https://foom.hyperplex.org/p/trillionboom

Chapter: MIRI: Research

Category: economics & deployment

Predicted: 2021

Resolution date: 2025

Status: falsified by events

Status detail: The prediction was resolved as falsified by events in 2025

Original source label: takeoff debate with Paul Christiano, Nov 2021

## Resolution

Hyperscaler AI capex ≈ $400B/yr, Nvidia ≈ $4T, fabs a macro story. The 'prohibited' world arrived. Doom did not.

## 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?

Context: The mainline explicitly permits no trillion-dollar commercial precursor. Today's frontier products are exactly that precursor.

Source: [Takeoff Speeds debate (2021)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vwLxd6hhFvPbvKmBH/yudkowsky-and-christiano-discuss-takeoff-speeds)

> 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

Context: His conditional sketch of a no-AGI 2031, delivered as a reductio, is arriving partially on schedule.

Source: [Takeoff Speeds debate (2021)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vwLxd6hhFvPbvKmBH/yudkowsky-and-christiano-discuss-takeoff-speeds)

## Sources

- [Takeoff Speeds debate (2021)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vwLxd6hhFvPbvKmBH/yudkowsky-and-christiano-discuss-takeoff-speeds)