Why the Next AGI Breakthrough Might Not Look Like a Chatbot

Hey friends 👋

Today we've got a Luma exec making the case that the real AGI race isn't about chatbots at all, plus a hiring stat that pokes a hole in the "AI is coming for your job" narrative. Let's dig in.

While everyone's fixated on the next LLM release, some serious people building AI labs are quietly betting the real prize is somewhere else entirely.

Caroline Ingeborn, COO of Luma, sat down with The Deep View to argue that physical AGI, the kind that understands and acts in the real world, will come from omnimodal world models rather than text-first LLMs. Luma's pitch is that humans don't think in one modality, so models that fuse text, video, image, and audio are a more honest map of how intelligence actually works. Right now Luma's bread and butter is the creative industries, entertainment, advertising, marketing, and Ingeborn frames the tech as augmenting creative work rather than replacing the people doing it.

The interview also gets into something I think gets skipped too often: the risk of centralized power if a handful of labs end up controlling physical AGI. That's a bigger deal than most headlines give it credit for once you're talking about systems that can act in the physical world, not just generate paragraphs.

Here's why it matters. LLMs got all the hype because they're the part of AI you can talk to. But if Ingeborn and the world model crowd are right, the technology that actually changes physical reality, robotics, manufacturing, logistics, might look nothing like ChatGPT. Worth watching who's building what, because the next phase of this race may not even look like a chatbot war.

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Everyone's been bracing for the layoff wave. New data says the opposite is happening, at least among the companies leaning hardest into AI.

Ramp and Revelio Labs looked at AI spending and workforce data across more than 21,000 US companies, and the heaviest AI adopters grew headcount by 10% over the past two years. Entry level hiring, the exact category everyone assumed AI would gut first, actually rose 12% among those same companies. The growth wasn't limited to engineering either. Sales, customer service, finance, and admin roles all saw statistically significant increases at high intensity adopters.

The catch is that this isn't every company. It's larger, more engineering heavy, often venture backed firms, concentrated in finance, insurance, and professional services. Healthcare, food service, and entertainment barely moved. Ramp's lead economist Ara Kharazian put it simply: cheaper software and analysis means companies can chase revenue they couldn't afford to chase before, and that takes people.

Here's why it matters. This doesn't kill the AI-job-loss story, but it does complicate it. The companies actually doing AI well aren't shrinking, they're expanding, and they're specifically hunting for people who know how to use the tools. If you're trying to figure out where you're valuable in this economy, "AI literacy" just stopped being a nice-to-have on a resume and started being the price of entry.

That's what stood out to me today. Reply and tell me what caught your eye, I read everything.

Talk tomorrow,
Hatman 🎩