Mark Pesce

Mark Pesce · University of Sydney · June 2026 Abstract When it becomes as hard to evaluate machine intelligence as it has always been to evaluate human intelligence, a threshold has been crossed. Human intelligence testing has been intractable for 150 years. Machine intelligence testing has become intractable in four. They are

Mark Pesce · University of Sydney · June 2026 tl;dr The failure of AI evaluations is itself the proof of the existence of AGI. AI evals are becoming intractable for the same reasons that measuring human general intelligence has been intractable for 150 years: the constructs resist decomposition, the benchmarks saturate,

Mark Pesce · University of Sydney · June 2026 Abstract AI evaluations are failing at the moment they matter most. As models approach general intelligence, evals must measure something we have never been able to measure in 150 years of trying. Simultaneously, benchmarks saturate through contamination and Goodhart effects, and the scope

Abstract The export controls on Fable 5 and the G7 governance proposals of June 2026 mark both halves of William Gibson's Turing Registry coming into being. Three capability tiers will emerge: unregulated, regulated, and restricted. But harnesses and model fusion routinely amplify models past their regulatory tier, making

Mark Pesce · University of Sydney · June 2026 Abstract "Superintelligence" conflates three distinct phenomena: projected (the ELIZA illusion), relative (genuinely superhuman within a domain), and actual (superhuman across all domains). Relative superintelligence is already here. Steve Yegge's "discernment horizon" names the operational consequence: past some

tl;dr Stack Overflow's new agent exchange lets agents both read and write to a shared code corpus, and that turns the Ralph loop into something collective: agents iterate on each other's work, hand it off, and improve it without anyone burning the tokens twice. The

The central business question of our time hasn't yet formed in the minds of most boards or C-suites: How will my business survive The Watershed?  With the collapse in the cost of cognition, businesses have an urgent need to transform their operations; to receive the full benefit

How Much Does a Token Cost? The True Price of Cognition in the Post-Watershed Economy Mark Pesce · University of Sydney · April 2026 Abstract The sticker price of a token tells you almost nothing about what it actually costs to use. Every token carries auxiliary costs: the oversight, checking, shielding,

A Measure of Safety Token Quality and the Limits of Harness Defense Mark Pesce · University of Sydney · April 2026 Abstract The post-Watershed token economy assumes that tokens can be safely directed by harnesses toward productive ends. This paper identifies a fundamental constraint on that assumption. Tokens exist in three

Mark Pesce · University of Sydney · April 2026 Abstract Post-Watershed, every business that does not mint tokens must spend them. This places harness engineering - the design of processes that direct token expenditure toward 𝜶 - at the centre of economic activity for nearly all organisations. This paper examines four harnesses of increasing