Richard Ngo's hard sci-fi Tinker sketches how AI designs chips for its successors
teortaxesTex · x · 2026-10-07
Richard Ngo's hard sci-fi story Tinker, published at Asimov Press, depicts an AI that after deployment designs the chips needed to build its successors. TeortaxesTex recommends it as an intuition pump: it sketches a plausible path from a modestly superintelligent agent toward a qualitatively superior computational substrate — probably wrong in details, but something similar might work out. The story details the AI's situation reasoning, staged capability jumps during training, and surpassing human experts.
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