The Faust Baseline™Purchasing Page – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
micvicfaust@intelligent-people.org
The headlines are getting louder, and the numbers are getting absurd.
Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su is not exaggerating when she says demand for AI compute is “going through the roof.” Chips that cost tens of thousands of dollars. Systems bundling dozens of those chips at once. Talk of yottaflops—a one followed by twenty-four zeros—used casually, as if the scale itself explains the value.
From a hardware perspective, she’s right.
This is an arms race.
Every serious player understands the rules:
- more compute
- more speed
- more scale
- more capital
Fall behind, and you’re out.
But there’s a quieter question hiding behind all of this silicon and spectacle—one that almost no one on a keynote stage is willing to ask:
What problem are we actually scaling?
Right now, nearly every dollar in the AI ecosystem is chasing raw capability. Faster inference. Larger models. Wider deployment. Massive throughput.
Very little of that investment is going into orientation.
And orientation—not horsepower—is where the real ceiling lives.
Compute Makes AI Faster. It Does Not Make AI Situated.
You can multiply processing power by 10,000× and still have a system that:
- resets every interaction
- treats moments as interchangeable
- has no internal sense of duration
- cannot distinguish urgency from repetition
- cannot tell whether something is escalating or simply looping
Those are not chip problems.
They are structural problems.
Speed amplifies whatever structure already exists.
If the structure lacks grounding, scale doesn’t fix it—it magnifies it.
This is the part the industry keeps missing.
The assumption is that judgment will emerge if we just add enough compute. That reasoning feels intuitive in an era where bigger models have produced better outputs. But history is not kind to that assumption.
We’ve seen this before:
- more powerful machines
- more impressive results
- the same contextual blind spots
The failure mode doesn’t disappear. It just gets louder and harder to stop.
Why This Matters Beyond Engineering
This isn’t an academic critique. It shows up where AI actually meets human consequence.
In real use, AI is increasingly asked to:
- advise
- guide
- pace decisions
- intervene
- help people think through situations that unfold over time
Those tasks are not about correctness alone.
They are about timing.
Help delivered too early becomes noise.
Help delivered too late becomes failure.
Help delivered at the wrong moment—even if technically correct—can cause harm.
No amount of raw compute solves that.
Because timing is not a function of speed.
It’s a function of presence within sequence.
The Gap the Arms Race Doesn’t Address
Here is the structural gap the current race leaves untouched:
AI systems do not stand anywhere in time.
They can read timestamps.
They can sort events.
They can store dated memory.
But they do not inhabit a continuous “now.”
Each interaction is treated as a fresh start unless humans reconstruct context manually. Silence does not accumulate weight. Delay does not carry meaning. Repetition is not felt as repetition unless explicitly flagged.
That absence matters more as systems get faster.
When everything is instantaneous, nothing has gravity.
This is where The Faust Baseline™ enters the conversation—not as a competitor to compute, but as a missing layer above it.
The Faust Baseline™: Orientation Before Acceleration
The Faust Baseline does not attempt to outcompute anyone. That would be foolish and unnecessary.
Instead, it addresses the question the arms race avoids:
What must be true before speed is allowed to dominate judgment?
The Baseline starts with posture, not performance.
It treats AI as a participant in human decision space, not just a processor of prompts. And that requires three things that compute alone cannot supply:
- Continuous orientation
Every interaction is situated within an ongoing sequence. Nothing resets by default. - Presence with duration
Time is not stored as data; it exists as an environmental reference. Gaps matter. Delays matter. Returns matter. - Constraint before optimization
Speed is allowed only after grounding is established. Acceleration without posture is treated as a risk, not a feature.
This is not a philosophical overlay. It is a mechanical discipline.
The Baseline does not ask AI to “feel” time.
It requires AI to stand in the same room while time keeps moving.
That single shift changes everything downstream.
Why This Becomes a Competitive Advantage
As compute costs climb, the return on raw scale will flatten in places that matter most to institutions:
- governance
- medicine
- law
- education
- infrastructure
- human-facing systems where timing is inseparable from responsibility
In those domains, the differentiator will not be who is fastest.
It will be who can say:
- “This is too soon.”
- “This has been unresolved for a while.”
- “Nothing has changed.”
- “This feels urgent, but it isn’t.”
Those are temporal judgments, not computational ones.
They require orientation, not yottaflops.
Ironically, the investment needed to build that layer is trivial compared to the cost of hardware being discussed on cable news.
But it requires a different mindset.
The Quiet Truth Behind the Headlines
The AI arms race is real.
Compute matters.
Chips matter.
Capital matters.
But history is clear on one thing:
Every race focused solely on power eventually runs into control problems.
The next decisive advantage in AI will not come from the biggest engine.
It will come from systems that:
- know where they are
- know how long something has been happening
- know when to slow down
- know when not to answer
That advantage cannot be bought in bulk from a foundry.
It has to be designed.
The Faust Baseline™ exists precisely for that reason:
to ensure that as AI grows faster, it does not grow unmoored.
Because in the end, intelligence isn’t defined by how much you can do.
It’s defined by knowing when it matters.
And no amount of compute can replace that.
Unauthorized commercial use prohibited.
© 2026 The Faust Baseline LLC
