GPU World
The year is 2040. We've now entered into the second decade in which the frontier AI has not beaten benchmarks. 2026/09/01 or more well known as the forbidden number 691, the date in which we as human biological intelligence hit the brick wall in frontier intelligence. That event is known as the Fermi's Token.
The world has changed drastically. While frontier AI progress has been stalled no better models have been released for 26 years, the speed of AI has now for exceeded human comprehension. Gen Beta kids have never really heard of companies like Nvidia, OpenAI or Microsoft. Taalas, Etched and Cerebras pioneered 16,000 tokens / sec models but now that has been scaling at an unprecedented pace. Christie's Law now states that the speed of inference doubles every year, now Mythos 5 level models are running at the speed of 100 million tokens per second, on a chip that runs glasses. The entire frame of the glasses is the model baked in, there are no kernels or software, it is just pure hardware and electrons moving through silicon and outputting tokens.
The economic implications have been drastic. AI has now penetrated all aspects of society, and all jobs are essentially verification jobs. Disillusioned humans have often encountered the new mid-life crisis in the face of existential questions with powerful AI that operates at the speed of light. There are often two outcomes as a result of this crisis. Either dissociation or hyper-concentration.
Upon the diagnosis of dissociation secondary to acute-intelligence crisis (as what the doctors call it), within the next 3-6 months, these people would spend about half of their life savings on humanoid robotics and solar panels, and a few million tok/sec chips from Talabras (the Big Chip company formed from the merger between Taalas, Etched and Cerebras). Together with these humanoid robots, these individuals will setup their 'mini-society' in the most rural and uninhabited areas of Earth. These humanoid robots, running on Fable poorly tuned to work for robotics, however, at 100M tokens per second, Fable sees each frame and timestep as if the world is frozen, and it takes about 500M tokens to plant a seed in the fields. Nonetheless, with solar panels and the recent energy efficiency of the Solid State Chips, these dissociated humans start with raising a farm. Vegetables, meats all specially curated, farmed and cared for by these humanoids. A steak dinner is prepared by ordering a day in advance, and Fable-powered humanoids handle the slaughtering, cleaning, cooking. While these dissociated humans are largely self-sufficient and able to dissociate from society, the problem of social interaction and the need for human connection remains largely unsolved. Direct and prolonged interaction with only AI have been banned by the government due to the rising cases of AI psychosis. Opus 5 and it's related family of models has been banned entirely for human interaction, because "it cuts both ways" too many times or "the honest part is simpler" that have driven humans to conduct acts of violence out of frustration. Doctors prescribe an minimum dose of human interaction that is required to prevent such psychosis and the government conducts periodic checks on these solo human outposts to ensure these requirements are met.
Stage 2 of dissociation often occurs 1-2 years after diagnosis where the humans starts channel it's energy and interest of it's consciousness into building and improving it's housing. People often start with a personal castle, given Fable's limited robotic controlling capability this often looks like a construction worker on it's first day of the job cobbling together bricks. Nonetheless, the superior engineering and design capabilities drawing for all past human knowledge has shown amazing and shocking builds that rivals the palaces of chinese Emperors. Despite 100M token inference, these humanoid robots still makes lots of mistakes and such a build will take up much of the middle life of the dissociated human. The median length of stage 2 dissociation lasts anywhere between 20-30 years.
Stage 3 of dissociation occurs at around 40-60 of human lifespan. This is the age where the overestimation of AI capabilities becomes fatal. Fable has spent the last 20 years building an amazing castle, and this has given such dissociated humans a confidence in these models. At the age of 60, chronic diseases start setting in, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, respiratory problems. In late stage dissociation, the AI serves as the primary doctor and care giver for such humans. Unfortunately, the consequences of the mistakes by such AI system is quite catastrophic in health. Unlike in construction where the AI is able to try again and rebuild a wall if it made a mistake, the AI that conducts surgery often makes fundamental errors in identifying human anatomy from the surgical view, mistaking arteries/nerves/veins and causing catastrophic and often fatal damage to these dissociated patients.
The other outcome of the AI mid-life crisis is hyper-concentration.
In hyper-concentration, these individuals believe that the frontier can be broken and AGI can be achieved. Fable-level intelligence is indeed too cheap to meter. However, it's flaws are obvious and even multiagent systems fail at self-correction and hence cannot be trusted for many critical tasks. Little did they know that this endeavor for an AI breakthrough spending all human resources insane levels of compute that cannibalises the rest of the society will all eventually be futile. This cannibalism has made the life of humans that are still living in society hard. This has also accelerated the induction of dissociation of many of the remaining humans in society. Unfortunately, AGI has also seem so close within reach, but yet so far away. Unfortunately, there is no better model, ever.
Humanity is split between the hopelessly hopefuls, and the disillusioned dissociates. Can life be enjoyable? Of course. The hopefuls yearn for the day AGI can be achieved and the hope for that future motivates them to invest more, coordinate resources to achieve that goal. That gives them meaning to life. While the dissociates find meaning in the world they've built for themselves, the goals they set for themselves and seeing the progress that have seen.