Episode #67
The Brain Is Not the Bottleneck
In 2013 a group of Berkeley researchers sat in my office in Silicon Valley asking for funding for an academic project called Spark. They were not on my calendar by accident. They were there because Konstantin Boudnik, one of the early developers of Apache Hadoop and co-creator of Apache Bigtop, who ran R&D for me, insisted I meet them. A man whose work was closely bound up with Hadoop, telling his chief executive to look hard at the technology most likely to displace part of it. On Thursday that company closed a $5 billion round at a $190 billion valuation. This episode is the story of what happened in between, and it begins with a second-hand Commodore 64 with a broken tape deck in a Swedish suburb. Four years of nobody wanting the technology. One sorting benchmark that reversed the industry's opinion overnight. A board telling them they had less revenue than the local restaurants. And a set of founders who genuinely did not know how venture capital worked. Then the claim that got Ali Ghodsi more attention this week than the money did: that artificial general intelligence has already arrived, measured against the definition researchers used before 2022, and that the industry quietly moved the goalposts rather than admit the bar had been cleared. His argument is that AI does not have an intelligence problem, it has a context problem. Demis Hassabis at Google DeepMind says 2029. Greg Brockman at OpenAI will not pick a date. I argue they are answering different questions, and only one of those has already been settled. Then what AGI actually means once you strip the science fiction out of it: not robots, but a fall in the price of cognition, and the ability to buy thinking without putting another person on the payroll. Goldman Sachs Research on 300 million exposed jobs, why its 16,000-a-month figure is a drag on hiring rather than a redundancy count, and the mechanism that matters more than the attribution, which is a hiring freeze at the entrance. Then my Yorkshire Post column this week. An AI law firm at Yorkshire AI Labs applied for professional indemnity cover, and the underwriters asked every question about people. We assumed they wanted a human in charge. They were confirming the opposite. The quote came back 50% lower. And finally the Week 33 layoff tracker update, led by Oracle, which reported headcount down 21,000 in a single fiscal year while spending $55.7 billion on capital expenditure, and told regulators in writing that AI deployment contributed to workforce reductions. Read the full issue free at thesundaysignal.ai Keywords: Databricks, Ali Ghodsi, Konstantin Boudnik, Hadoop, Apache Bigtop, AGI, artificial general intelligence, Apache Spark, enterprise AI, AI agents, Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind, Greg Brockman, OpenAI, venture capital, Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz, startup funding, valuation, Lakehouse, Lakebase, context engineering, AI layoffs, Oracle layoffs, future of work, automation, Goldman Sachs, labour market, entry level jobs, professional indemnity, insurance, human in the loop, AI regulation, UK technology, Yorkshire AI Labs, David Richards, The Sunday Signal
