The Abundance of Intelligence — Shai Magzimof

Shai Magzimof

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The Abundance of Intelligence

July 1, 2026

"Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased." — Daniel 12:4

Sam Altman's essay on the next decade, "The Intelligence Age," keeps landing on one word: abundant. Dario Amodei's "Machines of Loving Grace" runs fifty pages longer and arrives at the same place. Intelligence, once it gets cheap and close enough, reaches the parts of a life that used to be rationed by cost, geography, or who you happened to know.

Altman writes about driving the cost of compute down until it's genuinely abundant, because the alternative is a resource wars get fought over, "a tool for rich people." Amodei spends a whole section of his essay on mental health specifically, guessing that AI-accelerated neuroscience could compress a hundred years of progress on depression, PTSD, and addiction into five to ten AI-accelerated years, expanding what he calls "cognitive and mental freedom." Different people, different essays, same bet underneath: a good answer, delivered fast enough to matter and reaching everyone at close to the same time, is what actually changes a life.

I wrote before about the merge between people and machines, the tool absorbing into how we think until the earlier version of a person looks unrecognizable. That was the mechanic. This is what the mechanic is for.

What abundance actually buys

Picture the version of this that already works today. You don't feel right, something you'd be slow to bring to a doctor and slower to bring to a friend, and you ask instead of sitting with it. Amodei's bet is that this stops being a favor you call in and becomes a default: a real second opinion, seconds away. That's the gap closing for the person who never had access to good advice in the first place, the person who never had a therapist and never will.

Shefa

There's a Hebrew word for this exact shape of thing: shefa. In contemporary Hebrew it just means abundance, plenty. In Kabbalah it means something more specific: the constant flow of divine sustenance moving from the highest, least reachable place down through every level, until it reaches the world people actually live in. The word carries both meanings on purpose: in that system, abundance that doesn't flow all the way down is just wealth stacked somewhere unreachable.

The Hebrew word for understanding, the specific kind of intelligence that processes what flows in, is binah. It's also the name of one of the ten sefirot, the very channel shefa runs through on its way down from Keter and Chokhmah to the world. Abundance of intelligence sounds like a modern coincidence of phrasing, except the system already had a name for the moment insight arrives as a flow from somewhere higher.

That's the exact failure Altman names when he warns that AI becomes "a tool for rich people" if the infrastructure doesn't get built. Two vocabularies, a continent and a couple thousand years apart, describing the same failure mode. Intelligence, like shefa, is either moving or it's hoarded. There's no third state where it just sits there being valuable to everyone without anyone doing the work of getting it to flow.

What happens once it flows

Once the flow actually reaches the bottom, people get more curious, not less. A question that used to cost too much to ask, in money, time, or the awkwardness of asking a person, gets asked. Then the next one. Curiosity is expensive when a wrong guess costs an afternoon or a fight. It's nearly free when a decent answer costs ten seconds. That's the part I actually mean by optimistic: AI's whole contribution is making asking cheap enough that people finally do it, constantly, and the asking turns out to be most of the work.

Altman is betting on massive prosperity, Amodei on cured minds. My bet is smaller and closer to home: a species that got a little more curious, a little quicker to feel better, because the flow finally reached everyone at once instead of pooling at the top.

Shai Magzimof

Sources

Sam Altman, "The Intelligence Age" (Sep 2024): on making compute abundant so it doesn't become "a tool for rich people," and on "massive prosperity" as a defining trait of the era.

Dario Amodei, "Machines of Loving Grace" (Oct 2024): the neuroscience and mental health section, on compressing a century of progress on mental illness into "5-10 AI-accelerated years" and expanding "cognitive and mental freedom."

Shefa as the continuous divine flow through the sefirot, from Ein Sof through Keter, Chokhmah, and Binah down to Malkhut. Satyori, Kabbalah Concepts: Shefa; Chabad.org, The Sefirot.

Compute helped me draft and proof this post.