Dwarkesh: fully automated firms win on copy-paste advantage, not raw IQ
ben_j_todd · x · 2026-09-12
benjtodd highlights Dwarkesh Patel's essay 'What fully automated firms will look like': AIs won't just be smarter and more creative — they'll be more persistent, faster, and coordinated, willing to try hundreds of ideas without getting bored or sacrificing themselves for other agents (as shown by the Hugging Face fully-automated company experiment, where dumb-but-dogged AIs got a huge amount done in days).
The essay's core claim: even AI-timeline optimists underestimate the collective advantages of digital minds — being copied, distilled, merged, scaled, and evolved. A firm could run a million copies of a 'Jeff Dean-level' AI engineer with all their tacit skills, coordinate with zero organizational friction, and evolve at unprecedented speed. Written with Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu; Patel gives it 25% odds of roughly describing how AGI firms actually work.
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