The Three AI Pills | Don't Worry About the Vase
Don't Worry About the Vase
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The Three AI Pills
Posted on August 5, 2026 by TheZvi
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.
Three Pills
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 Unpill People
I see unpilled people.
Where do I see them? Everywhere. 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 have used only ChatGPT, for harmless trifles, and they hold years old memories of its failings. They mock any failure anywhere as ‘what AI can do.’
They dismiss AI as worthless because it pointed them to a closed store or recommended the wrong number of pizzas. They cite old studies that were obsolete before they were published and used terrible prompting techniques.
They often still talk about ‘stochastic parrots’ or how AI can never possibly think and everything must be stolen from the training data. And so on.
Some versions of this are wrong. Some are Not Even Wrong. None are reasonable.
When you discuss AI with people who are fully unpilled, your goal is usually to first give them the AI pill. Show them that AI can do the things it can already do.
The AI Pill
Even fully taking the first AI pill is a big deal.
Existing AI unlocks, today, in practice, tons of cool things. It is, in many ways, already smarter and more capable than you.
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.
So many questions previously not worth asking are now worth asking.
The marginal cost of seeing what the AI can do for you is often very close to zero.
AI can also do a variety of harmful things, or do things that are useful for you but make others worse off or disrupt or invalidate norms or systems. People don’t like that.
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.
Often they say things like ‘AI will be too expensive to use on [X]’ because they don’t realize it will soon be orders of magnitude cheaper for the same level of intelligence. Or they point to particular details where AI does poorly, and presume this will not be fixed. They see AI as ‘uncompetitive’ without realizing the situation is temporary.
When you discuss AI with someone who has taken only the first pill, you typically have three basic options.
You can try to ‘fully AI pill’ them and explain the things AI can already do and the implications of what that means, even if things stop here.
You can try to explain that we will get better at using what AI we have, and that there is a lot of ‘unhobbling’ left for us to do, even if things stop here.
You can explain that things will not stop here, and you need to be thinking about what future AIs will be able to do. Get them to take at least the AGI pill.
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.
AI capabilities will not permanently stop here. It is wrong to not take the second pill.
Stuck At The First Pill
Our debates about AI remain largely stuck on settled questions, because so many people cannot even take the first pill.
Dean W. Ball: A couple years ago, the AI debate was centered, rightfully, on whether crazy-sounding things like “AIs autonomously making math breakthroughs” and “AIs breaking from their sandbox and hacking on the internet” would be real things in the near term. Sometimes it feels like that’s still the debate we’re having. This can be frustrating, because in my view, that debate is settled and was settled quite a while ago.
To have good discussions, we need to at least take the second pill.
Whereas, yes, many people, even many who work with AI, really do say current AI is ‘good enough’ and can’t imagine what a better one can do. As in, someone tweeting at Sam Altman saying ‘Sol does everything I want it to do, this is all I ever need’ and Altman retweeting saying they were wrong. Which they...