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This is an experiment in short-form content on LW2.0. I'll be using the comment section of this post as a repository of short, sometimes-half-baked posts that either:
don't feel ready to be written up as a full post
I think the process of writing them up might make them worse (i.e. longer than they need to be)
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I think the AI as normal technology people are imagining diffusion etc bottlenecks to limit a lot of economic growth from AI. If you run the logical implications of their predictions forwards (which tbc I think is kinda insane), the direct implication of their worldview is that there's a lot of economic growth left from current generation models, so Anthropic's current 50B ARR is an extreme underestimate of future value (though much of it might not be captured by the labs, similar to how the impact of electricity is mostly not captured by the utility companies).
I on the other hand think the main economic gains are much more limited by capabilities rather than diffusion, at least as of today's models (I'm even more confident about the models of a year back, naturally[1]). Tbc 10x or even 30x the diffusion of today's models is plausible to me, tho probably still smaller than the internet's sustained effect.
Reasons that I might be underestimating the potential economic impact of today's models, that mostly won't apply to those of a year ago:
The labs have access to private models that the public have not seen or evaluated
Publicly available models like Fable 5 and 5.6 Sol might be massively nerfed by Anthropic and OpenAI, there's suggestive evidence that the nerfs hit hardest on the most economically valuable tasks. Presumably they'd let up in the future, even if we otherwise freeze capabilities.
The latest models have only been released for a few weeks, maybe there are industries where much of the job can be automated but we haven't figured out the scaffolding or institutional processes to do so.
This is an experiment in short-form content on LW2.0. I'll be using the comment section of this post as a repository of short, sometimes-half-baked posts that either:
I ask people not to create top-level comments here, but feel free to reply to comments like you would a FB post.