Certain classes of problems can be solved by searching over the space of possible solutions, either via brute force or some more clever technique like MCTS. For those types of problems, searching faster or more cleverly can solve them.

Other types of problems require measurement in the real world in order to solve them. Better telescopes, better microscopes, more accurate sensing mechanisms to gather more precise data. No AI can accomplish this. An AI can help you to design better measurement techniques, but actually taking the measurements will require real time in the real world. And some of these measurement instruments have enormous construction costs, for example CERN or LIGO.

All of this is to say that there will color point at our current resolution of information that no more intelligence can actually be extracted. We’ve already turned through the entire Internet. Maybe there are other data sets we can use, but everything will have diminishing returns.

So when people talk about trillion dollar superclusters, that only makes sense in a world where compute is the bottleneck and not better quality information. Much better to spend a few billion dollars gathering higher quality data.