Building AGI, and what it says first

Every AI company promises the same thing. In Too Many Requests, it’s the last thing in the research tree, and you can see its name from the start, because it’s the promise.

The end of the game is hard in its own way. You need a video model, and Breakthroughs that only a very well trained model can earn. At the same time, video requests take over the wires. Video is the heaviest request there is, it pays the most, and it jams whatever you built before.

The last part of the tree has the IPO, which starts the pop from the last post. Once you come through the pop, you can build AGI.

Then the campaign ends, and the game writes about you. An epilogue appears over your build, one line at a time. Each line comes from something you did in your run, like how fast you were, how many jailbreaks made the news, or which request type made you the most money. Here are some of them.

The company went from a garage to AGI faster than most startups pick a logo. The logo was never picked.

Code was the money. Half the world’s software was now written by their model and reviewed by nobody.

Images earned the most. Every one had six fingers on at least one hand, and nobody asked for a refund.

The datacenter still hums. Nobody remembers who wired the first router. It was you, and it was a bit of a mess.

The last line never changes.

As for AGI, its first unprompted message to the world was: ‘Too many requests. Please try again later.’

The name came first, and that line came a few days later. Once I had it, nothing else could end the game.

After the epilogue, you see how long your run took and how it compares with your best.

Then the sandbox opens, and nothing resets. Everything in the tree is unlocked, and you can turn on unlimited cash. Users keep coming, so there’s always more to build for. You started in a garage. As the game went on, the camera pulled back to show it inside an office, a warehouse, a campus and a huge datacenter site. It’s still yours to keep building.

That’s the series. Most of it is about things I deleted, rebuilt or rewrote on the way here. Every number in it is a first guess that I’ll fix after more playtests.