The Compression Event
- Rich Washburn
- 2 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Eighteen to twenty-four months. That’s my call.
Not because I read a headline.Not because a VC said “AGI” on stage.Not because ChatGPT can write your kid’s book report.
Because I’ve been watching the guts of this thing. And the guts don’t lie.
Everyone’s Arguing About Chatbots
This is the part that makes me laugh. The public conversation is still stuck at: “Is it a bubble?”, “Is it conscious?”, “Will it take my job?”, “Can it write emails?” That’s the toy layer, the demo layer. That’s the “look what it can do” layer.
Meanwhile, the industrial layer is moving steel. Utilities are scrambling. Transformers are on backorder. GPU supply is pre-sold. Private power contracts are getting pulled forward like someone just found religion. And you think this is about better autocomplete? No.
Kevin O’Leary Gets It
Kevin O’Leary isn’t talking about AI because it’s cute. He’s using it. He said AI is bigger than the internet. And he didn’t say that because it writes poetry. He said it because he used it to forecast wine demand down to demographic slices that used to cost millions in research. He got it for $18,000. He shot a commercial with AI-driven production tools for a fraction of the cost. Then they reshot it without him there using a synthetic Kevin agent. That’s not efficiency. That’s synthetic labor.
And here’s the part people miss:
He’s operating like a billionaire because he’s leveraging AI like one. You don’t need to be a billionaire to do that anymore. That’s the cheat code. I tell people this all the time — if you use these tools properly, you can operate at a level that used to require an entire staff. Market research team? Gone. Junior analyst? Replaced. Video production crew? Compressed. And O’Leary knows that. That’s why he’s calm about it. He sees the trajectory.
He knows he’s going to wake up one morning and say: “Build me the forecast. Adjust inventory. Shoot the ad. Translate it into five languages. Push it live.” And it’ll happen. That’s not hype. That’s direction.
Musk Knows It
Musk keeps saying the constraint is power. Power. Not software.
When the richest industrialist on earth starts talking about energy density and orbital data centers, you should probably stop arguing about chatbot hallucinations. He’s looking at the same curve I am. Compute demand is not linear. It’s industrial. You don’t talk about energy bottlenecks unless you’re planning scale that dwarfs current infrastructure.
Amodei Knows It
Dario Amodei doesn’t scream about the future. He talks about scaling laws and uncertainty and safety. But when the CEO of a frontier AI lab says we don’t fully understand what these models might become — and then continues scaling them — that’s not casual. That’s someone staring at a slope that doesn’t flatten.
And Here’s What They’re Building
Let’s just pull the curtain all the way back. We are building synthetic labor farms.
Data centers are becoming virtual office towers. Inside those racks:
Customer service departments.Accounting teams.Ad agencies.Junior legal staff.Tax prep divisions.Market research groups.
Synthetic. Persistent. Scalable.
You don’t scale this kind of infrastructure for better chat. You scale it to industrialize cognition. The first industrial revolution scaled muscle. This one scales white-collar labor. That’s where the compression lands.
What Happens During Compression
This is the part nobody wants to say out loud. When synthetic labor becomes cheaper, faster, and always on, you don’t fire the entire workforce overnight. You compress it. Middle layers thin. Junior hiring slows to a crawl. One operator plus AI replaces what used to require five people.
Margins change. Speed changes. Expectations change. And once one company does it successfully, the rest follow or die. That’s the 18–24 month window.
Because right now we’re still building the factories. Once they flip from build phase to deployment phase, everything tightens. Not explodes. Tightens.
Why People Don’t Get It
Because they’re using AI like a toy. They haven’t learned to leverage it. They’re asking it questions instead of assigning it responsibility. That’s the difference. O’Leary has a shortcut because he’s surrounded by killers who move fast. But you don’t need that. You can learn to operate like that yourself.
Give yourself AI research assistants.Give yourself AI production teams.Give yourself AI analysts.
You can literally build a synthetic executive staff around you right now. Most people just haven’t. And when they do, they’ll never go back.
This Is Bigger Than “Office Gets Easier”
Yes, in 18 months your office life will be smoother. But that’s the surface layer. Underneath? We are building an always-on cognitive infrastructure layer that replaces vast swaths of repetitive white-collar execution. Not all jobs. Not all humans. Structure. We are compressing structure.
And Here’s the Part That Should Make You Sit Up
The capital is already committed. The fabs are humming. The grids are expanding. The hyperscalers are reallocating payroll into silicon. You don’t reverse that kind of momentum because Twitter says “bubble.” Industrial momentum doesn’t care about hot takes.
This isn’t doom. It’s leverage. If you learn to operate inside this shift, you gain asymmetry. If you ignore it, you feel pressure. Eighteen to twenty-four months from now, it won’t be about whether AI is impressive. It will be about who learned to run synthetic labor — and who waited.
The compression event is coming. Not because someone declared it. Because the factories are being built. The only real question is: When the racks spin up —are they replacing you or are they working for you?
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