In 2018, Sam Altman paid $10,000 to reserve a spot on a waitlist for a startup that would pump embalming chemicals through his arteries while he was still alive. He was 32. He told MIT Technology Review he assumed his brain would be uploaded to the cloud.

He is not alone.

Larry Ellison has spent over $350 million on anti-aging research. Bezos seeded Altos Labs. Page created Calico. Altman later put $180 million of his own money into Retro Biosciences.

The men pouring billions into not dying are the same men starting the AI companies.

In her book Empire of AI, Karen Hao shows why they keep splintering off to build new ones. Musk left OpenAI for xAI. Amodei left for Anthropic. Sutskever left for Safe Superintelligence. Her explanation from years of reporting: "They want to create AI in their own image."

Last Monday, the Financial Times reported that inside Meta, a photorealistic 3D version of Zuckerberg is being trained to speak with employees in his place. His voice. His mannerisms. His strategic thinking. He is personally supervising the training. Roughly 79,000 employees will eventually take their questions to the avatar.

Zuckerberg's term for what he is building: "personal superintelligence."

When the biology hits its limit, the next move is silicon. Clone the voice, load a lifetime of strategies and moods into a model, and it keeps speaking after the body stops.

P.S. I wrote about what this kind of scaling costs the people on the other end of it. "The Assembly Line in the Sky" is in the first comment.