Recently, industry insiders have pointed out that achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is now a certainty, but this is only the starting point. The ultimate goal is to advance toward Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI), which surpasses human capabilities and can self-evolve. What is ASI? What stages will its development go through? What are the future industrial potential and investment prospects?

**Three-Stage Evolution: From "Learning Humans" to "Surpassing Humans"**

AGI aims to liberate humans from 80% of daily work, allowing people to focus on creation and exploration. ASI, as a system that comprehensively surpasses human intelligence, is expected to create "super scientists" and "cross-disciplinary super engineers," potentially accelerating breakthroughs in major challenges in frontier fields such as medicine, materials, energy, climate, and aerospace.

Specifically, the path to ASI can be divided into three key stages:

**First Stage: Intelligence Emergence — "Learning Humans"** Decades of internet development have laid the foundation for knowledge digitization in intelligent technology. Current large models have developed generalized intelligence and universal conversational capabilities by understanding massive digitized knowledge. They can not only understand intentions and answer questions but also possess preliminary multi-step reasoning abilities, marking AI's entry into the "learning humans" stage.

**Second Stage: Autonomous Action — "Assisting Humans"** Current AI development is at this critical stage. Its core characteristic is breaking through language interaction limitations and, under human goal setting, possessing the ability to decompose complex tasks and use and create tools, thereby autonomously completing interactions between digital and physical worlds and having tremendous impact on the real world.

**Third Stage: Self-Iteration — "Surpassing Humans"** This is a critical transition stage in AI development, requiring two core elements: AI connection to complete raw data of the physical world and achieving autonomous learning. Currently, AI is progressing rapidly in content creation, mathematics, and programming, but is limited by data dimensions. When AI penetrates more physical scenarios and understands more raw data, its model and agent capabilities will significantly enhance, potentially autonomously building training infrastructure, optimizing data processes, and upgrading model architecture, ultimately achieving self-iteration and the goal of surpassing human intelligence.

**Capital Influx: AI Infrastructure Investment Approaches Trillion-Level Scale**

To welcome the arrival of the super intelligence era, technology companies are actively expanding AI infrastructure investments. Taking a major domestic technology company as an example, it has launched a three-year AI infrastructure plan with a total scale of 380 billion yuan and plans to continue additional investments. According to long-term planning, by 2032, the company's global data center energy consumption scale will increase tenfold compared to 2022, reflecting that its cloud computing power investment will show exponential growth.

Globally, AI investment also shows high-speed growth trends. According to a report released by International Data Corporation (IDC), the global artificial intelligence (AI) IT total investment scale in 2024 was $315.9 billion and is expected to increase to $1.261.9 billion by 2029, with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 31.9%.

**Potential Release: Reshaping Productivity, Opening Trillion-Dollar Markets**

Artificial intelligence is becoming the most decisive technological force of the current era, with transformation depth far exceeding historical technological revolutions. Industry insiders point out that just as electricity once amplified human physical strength leverage, ASI will exponentially amplify human intelligence leverage. In the future, every household, factory, and enterprise is expected to be equipped with numerous intelligent agents and robots providing 24-hour services, fundamentally reshaping productivity.

In terms of market scale, according to United Nations Conference on Trade and Development predictions, by 2033, the global artificial intelligence market size will surge from $189 billion in 2023 to $4.8 trillion, representing a 25-fold increase within ten years. The overall share of artificial intelligence in global frontier technology will rise from the current 7% to 29% and become the dominant force in this field.

Against the backdrop of ASI technological evolution and continuous industrial capital influx, AI-related fields are becoming the focus of capital markets. Investors can share in the high-growth dividends of the AI industry by focusing on relevant ETFs and their feeder funds that track technology and artificial intelligence sectors.