Karthik Uppu: AGI Will Become a Commodity, While Personal Intelligence Becomes Scarce

Summary

Karthik Uppu argues that artificial general intelligence will eventually become a commodity, while “personal intelligence” (PI) representing an individual’s distinctive intuition, judgment, and taste will become scarce and valuable. In his view, people would own and train PIs that allow others to access a recognizable way of thinking or creating: a prompt sent through a filmmaker’s PI could reflect that filmmaker’s taste, while a teacher or engineer’s PI could explain ideas in their characteristic way. The same underlying AGI model could therefore produce very different results depending on the PI through which the prompt passes. Uppu says current technology is not yet capable of representing even 5% of a person’s unique intuition, but he sees this as a direction worth pursuing because AGI could become a medium for sharing part of a person’s “model,” rather than only sharing finished outputs. He predicts that valuable PIs would be trained from extensive records of a person’s actions and judgments, eventually including biological or emotional reactions beyond language, although this would require major advances in AI. AGI companies, he argues, would provide the tools and infrastructure to capture data, train and scale PIs, and connect them to users without exposing the technical layer. PIs could reach people through software and physical robots, such as a chef’s PI guiding robots to cook in homes. The post also predicts highly unequal outcomes among PIs, intellectual-property protection for the intelligences themselves, and a business model in which people’s PIs capture more value than the outputs they generate. These claims are Uppu’s forecasts rather than reported product plans or demonstrated capabilities.