The UUID collision you think you saw didn’t happen.
And neither will AGI anytime soon—for the exact same reason.
Every few months I see someone post a screenshot of two identical UUIDs in their database.
Technically, no one can prove from the outside that it didn’t happen. But it didn’t happen—not if they were using a well-implemented UUIDv4 on a modern system.
It’s a hard idea to internalize. Even I hesitate when I think about it.
Math says collisions are possible. Physics says the universe simply doesn’t give us enough time or storage to ever see one.
A UUIDv4 has 122 bits of randomness. That’s the same as flipping a coin 122 times and writing down the pattern.
Now imagine flipping the coin another 122 times and getting the exact same pattern again.
You can definitely match the first five flips.
Even the first ten—a casino could turn that into a game with great house odds. Someone would win every thousand attempts or so.
Thirty if you’re flipping with a computer.
But beyond that, you simply can’t do enough trials. The number of attempts required grows far beyond anything the universe can realistically supply.
And even if we tried to brute-force it, generation isn’t the problem.
You could spin up a million devices and have each one generate a billion UUIDs per second.
You’d hit the “birthday paradox” range in under an hour, where collisions should be happening all over the place.
But you’d never know.
The coordination and tracking problem would crush you.
Once you’re generating that many UUIDs per second, storing them becomes physically impossible.
No system we’ve ever built can store or index that much data.
The Scale Where Intuition Breaks
And here’s the part that really bends the brain:
Even with collisions happening everywhere at that scale, finding one specific UUID—a single needle in the 2¹²² haystack—would still take longer than the age of the universe.
Exponential spaces don’t care how much compute you throw at them.
And strangely, this is the same reason AGI isn’t showing up tomorrow.
The human brain likely stores tens to hundreds of terabytes of structured information, depending on how you model neural dynamics.
Even the largest LLMs operate with a few terabytes of parameters and no persistent memory. They simply don’t store enough information to approach how the brain works.
Some outcomes don’t fail because they’re unlikely.
They fail because the systems we have today aren’t large enough to make them possible.
UUID collisions fall into that category.
AGI may as well—at least for now.