---
title: "Superintelligence is already here, today"
author: Noah Smith
source: Noahopinion (Substack)
date: 2026-03-02
processed_by: theseus
processed_date: 2026-03-06
type: newsletter
status: complete (13 pages)
claims_extracted:
  - "three conditions gate AI takeover risk autonomy robotics and production chain control and current AI satisfies none of them which bounds near-term catastrophic risk despite superhuman cognitive capabilities"
enrichments:
  - target: "recursive self-improvement creates explosive intelligence gains because the system that improves is itself improving"
    contribution: "jagged intelligence counterargument — SI arrived via combination not recursion (converted from standalone by Leo PR #27)"
---

# Superintelligence is already here, today

Noah Smith's argument that AI is already superintelligent via "jagged intelligence" — superhuman in aggregate but uneven across dimensions.

Key evidence:
- METR capability curve: steady climb across cognitive benchmarks, no plateau
- Erdos problems: ~100 transferred from conjecture to solved
- Terence Tao: describes AI as complementary research tool that changed his workflow
- Ginkgo Bioworks + GPT-5: 150 years of protein engineering compressed to weeks
- "Jagged intelligence": human-level language/reasoning + superhuman speed/memory/tirelessness = superintelligence without recursive self-improvement

Three conditions for AI planetary control (none currently met):
1. Full autonomy (not just task execution)
2. Robotics (physical manipulation at scale)
3. Production chain control (self-sustaining hardware/energy/infrastructure)

Key insight: AI may never exceed humans at intuition or judgment, but doesn't need to. The combination of human-level reasoning with superhuman computation is already transformative.

Source PDF: ~/Desktop/Teleo Codex - Inbox/Noahopinion/Gmail - Superintelligence is already here, today.pdf
