Mindscape

Boil the Ocean

2 min read

Boil the Ocean

“Don’t boil the ocean” is good advice in normal times. It keeps teams focused and prevents scope creep. Garry Tan argues that artificial superintelligence means we are no longer in normal times.

Artificial Superintelligence means it’s time to boil the ocean. We’ll start with a few lakes first.

Core Idea

Fear of AI is proportional to the smallness of the ambition.

If the plan is to keep doing the same work, AI is terrifying. If the plan is to build something dramatically bigger, AI is leverage.

The mistake is treating AI as a cost-cutting tool for doing the same thing cheaper. The better question is what was previously impossible:

  • A service 100x better than the incumbent.
  • A product so good people would happily pay 10x.
  • Talking to every user and understanding every product bug.
  • Turning questions that used to be rhetorical into engineering problems.

Old Game vs New Game

The old game:

  • 5% efficiency gains.
  • 2% margin improvement.
  • Lower cost by firing people.
  • Optimize the 1.05x present.

The new game:

  • Raise the aspiration.
  • Build for the 10x future.
  • Use intelligence and labor leverage to create more valuable products and services.
  • Boil lakes and oceans instead of drowning ambition in committee.

Ephemeralization and Jevons

Tan links this to Buckminster Fuller’s “ephemeralization”: doing more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.

This is not just job destruction. It is civilization getting better at being civilization.

He also frames AI as Jevons Paradox for intelligence. When a resource becomes dramatically more efficient, usage can increase rather than decrease. Steam engines did not reduce coal consumption; they made coal useful enough for demand to explode.

The same may happen with intelligence, labor, services, and products.

Practical Rule

Do not use AI only to make the current plan cheaper.

Use it to ask whether the plan is too small.

Source: Garry Tan, “Boil the Ocean”

Graph View