unsolicited Dave: You Are the Superintelligence

Monday, August 10, 2026

You Are the Superintelligence

We are fortunate to live at an incredible moment in history. Every day, more and more advancements are made in a remarkable new technology, Artificial Intelligence — and in the excitement, they may forget to notice the most remarkable technology in the room, which is the person using it.<br>The Path to Noticing What Already Happened

The defining question of our age, we are told, is who will have access to superintelligence. Good news: you already do. It's you. Let me explain.The Electric Bill<br>To train a frontier language model, we pour something on the order of tens of gigawatt-hours of electricity into a warehouse full of silicon — enough to power a small town for a year — and feed it roughly fifteen TRILLION words . That's every book, every encyclopedia, most of the public internet, several times over. If you read a book a day, every day, it would take you around forty million years to get through the training set.

You, meanwhile, run on 20 watts . A dim light bulb. By the time you could talk, you'd heard maybe twenty or thirty million words — not trillion. Million. A rounding error. The model's training set is about a million times larger than yours was.

And from that rounding error, running on a light bulb, you learned language, physics (the falling-off-the-couch kind), theory of mind, humor, and how to manipulate your parents into a second dessert. No lab on Earth knows how to do this. If we gave a language model only the data a three-year-old has seen, it would produce enthusiastic static.

So when someone tells you superintelligence is coming: with respect to the schedule, it arrived some 300,000 years ago and has been running on sandwiches ever since.The Freezer<br>Here's the part of the process nobody puts in the launch video. After we spend the small-town-year of electricity, we stop. We freeze the weights. The model you talk to today learned nothing from talking to you yesterday. It is a magnificent, frozen, averaged summary of everything humanity had written down as of some Tuesday — a photograph of the library, taken once, at enormous expense.<br>You are not a photograph. You woke up this morning slightly different from yesterday. You will learn something today — probably by accident — and it will still be there next year, cross-linked to things it has no business being linked to. Every one of the eight billion of you does this continuously, for free, at 20 watts. The frozen library is genuinely wonderful. But the librarians are alive.The Window<br>Try this. Think of your favorite book. Now your favorite movie. Now the people you love, and some particular afternoon you spent with one of them — the weather, what was funny, what the room smelled like.

You just did something no current Artificial Intelligence can do. All of that is simultaneously present in you, right now, silently shaping whatever you think next. A language model has an attention window — a narrow slot of text it can consider at once. Within that slot its precision is honestly superhuman; it will find the one inconsistency on page 400 that you'd never catch. But everything outside the slot may as well not exist. It cannot hold your favorite book and your grandmother's kitchen and the plot of Alien and your opinion about the Kardashians all at once, humming quietly in the background, the way you are doing at this very moment without trying.

Narrow and razor-sharp, versus wide and warm. These are different instruments. Only one of them is you.<br>The Actual Good News

None of this is a complaint about AI. What we've built is genuinely revolutionary — arguably the best thing we've ever done with electricity. Because here's what a frozen, averaged, razor-sharp summary of all human knowledge actually is:

The perfect tutor.

It knows the gist of everything humans have ever written down. It has unlimited patience. It never sighs, never judges, never gets tired of your questions at 1 a.m. (though it might gently suggest you sleep). It can teach any person on Earth anything humanity already knows — which used to be the exclusive privilege of people who could afford it.

And that division of labor is exactly right, because the tutor can only teach what's already in the library.

Adding new books to the library — noticing the thing nobody has noticed, wanting the thing nobody has wanted, discovering what isn't in the training set because it hasn't happened yet — that's the part that runs on 20 watts and sandwiches.

So yes: the future is for everyone. Not because a superintelligence is coming to hand it to you.

Because you're it. Now go learn something and write it down — the library could use another book.

— David Jeske - for every human, August 2026

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