openai.comarticle

The eternal complement

First essay in the OpenAI-hosted "The Next Economy" series. It argues that frontier intelligence is one input in a production process and is complementary to physical capacity and "institutional intelligence" (execution, bureaucracy, supply chains). It sets out two scenarios for a superintelligent future: a "civilization of depth", where better reasoning and simulation cut the need for experiments, and a "civilization of width", where empirical and physical bottlenecks mean most machine intelligence does coordination and construction work. It draws on Bloom et al. on falling research productivity and examples such as JWST, chip fabs, and drug trials. The authors' views are independent of OpenAI's.