By 2030, the largest AI models could require 1,000 times today’s compute, training clusters costing hundreds of billions of dollars, and city-scale electrical demand. Such scale might sound science fictional, at least until you recall that even three years ago, today’s frontier systems looked implausible. Epoch predicts that AI assistants are “at minimum” likely to improve day-to-day productivity by 10–20 percent, at least within non-experimental work tasks. Now this is the point AI worriers often miss: The potential economic upside dwarfs the usual discussion about automating white-collar drudgery. (Keep in mind that most economic forecasts about the impact of AI don’t attempt to calculate the impact of faster scientific progress.)