fredreelz's Shortform

fredreelz

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Epistemic Status: Strong opinion loosely held. Haven't ran numbers or considered corporate espionage (e.g. accidental collisions of certain satellites that were giving africans just enough internet to go on TBA). Unsure if the time horizons of rapid industrialization betray the slowest timelines for venture-backed startups (occam's razor suggests this).

There's a loosely held argument that frontier labs ought to focus some efforts towards debatably 'woke' causes that, if leveraged appropriately (load-bearing sufficient assumption), may fast-track their path to profitability. For example: water desalination, irrigation + terraforming parts of africa, portable nuclear energy, better internet coverage in pre-industrialized countries.

Reasoning:

Bringing more people online requires leapfrogging steps to industrialization
- In order to have good internet, you need to have good internet infrastructure (CPEs, repeaters, backhauls), or a couple of satellites
- In order to have good internet infrastructure, you need cheap energy and good energy infra
- In order to have cheap energy and good energy infra, you need to buy or build power plants, and the requisite infra to support them.
- In order to have the infra to support power plants, you need good roads, transit systems, sewage and waste management systems.
- In order to have that support infra, you need people trained and incentivized to maintain it ( who probably need to have a sense of pride in their labor and not feel overly extracted from, etc).
Over 2.2 billion people, or over 20% of the planet is not meaningfully online (say, online enough to doomscroll, or build a business on the internet)
Right now, OAI has ~800mm WAUs as of late 2025, or ~13% of the online world.
If the same proportion of those 2.2 billion people were brought online and converted to being OAI customers, all else being equal, that would lead to about a 286 million person bump in their WAUs.
That's a 35% increase in WAUs, without counting the nonlinear increases in productivity and AI adoption.
More importantly, this creates newer and better pipelines for human data, which is something that AI labs are paying a lot for (maybe unduly, if you see how some data brokers are banning whole countries because they weren't adversarially QAing data submissions correctly).

Curious what others think!

1152334H6mo

I think primary crux: * Your time preference ~= 0. * I assume frontier lab CEOs time preference >> 0, analogously valued "the house is on fire and 2030 is practically an eternity away" * Almost all the mental frames you invoke are irrelevant when time preference is high. You and I may have differing opinions on the origins of poverty internationally, but even the most optimistic humanist would not expect targeted industrial policy within the poorest decile of third world states to yield astounding gains in disposable income within the next 5 years. And within that timeframe, the baser facts around consumption limits of the poor takes over. Given you mention up-market consumers specifically, you're clearly aware the lion's share of rideshare profits come from monetizable affluent cities, and that e.g. the majority of emerging cities in ASEAN are currently broadly unmonetizable from Grab's perspective.

1fredreelz5mo

Yeah, I'd agree that the mental frames I invoke are irrelevant when time preference is high. But that suggests there's a hidden primary crux: * Corporate interests take precedent over research goals like 'alignment' or 'safety' Would you agree that that's a crux affecting frontier lab CEOs' time preferences? To the point about Grab vs frontier labs, Grab presumably has a lower time preference than frontier labs. They don't need trillions of dollars ASAP, so they can afford to wait until exogenous factors make it easier to support emerging cities in ASEAN, no?

missing the point -- there are far more mundane reasons to decide bumrushing AGI is important, like

their desire for progress
getting high over various monkey competitive instincts in the whole race
shifting political winds. presumably midterms aren't great and 2028 is very bad unless AGI windfall can reverse opinion trends
the halftime of market positivity on AI, which while nominally a corporate interest will affect every AI effort if a crash occurs, not just one company

corporate interests are possibly relevant but almost certainly not #1 reason to race

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