Think about theory of the firm: the firm is the largest portion of the economy that is better run through an authoritarian central planning regime rather than using the market prices to orient and organize production.
What we have seen with informatics over the past few decades is exactly that bigger is getting better. For years now the small-cap factor no longer works. J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. is world's largest bank and it's outperforming the industry. Amazon is capable to coordinate more than 1.5 million full-time employees worldwide.
As AGI accelerates this trend, there's no reason to imagine we won't see further consolidation. Yeah, sure, some people like Pepsi and other people like Coca-Cola. But likely there won't be 2,000 different soda brands that each one needs to be individual oversight by humans.
If you can organize production more through central planning through informatics and AGI, I dunno there will be much work left for humans to do.
And obviously, people on LW are überbulls on ASI. The view is that it'll get millions of times smarter, whatever you define, than humans.
I think we should just assume that Claude Code has already been attacked by multiple fronts.
Someone posted on X's fintwit:
Claude Code virality is first big AI hit which inspires lots of short ideas but almost no longs. Who benefits besides anthropic or ai infra trade that’s already max long?
To me, this is more evidence of dystopia. Maybe I am more optimistic than the average LessWronger who believes in apocalypse, but this updates me towards a very weird future.
This hints to a future where AI is extremely deflationary.
My take is that because intelligence no longer will be what defines us as humans, reconnecting with our bodies is a nice way to find purpose.
Is AI taking artists jobs?
Thank you for replying.
They would be permanently shut out of all Western trade and technology sharing.
That's not true. Many countries um the West were literally fascists during WWII. I can totally imagine worlds where China and the West get along after that.
All critical semiconductor manufacturing in Taiwan will be destroyed by the US or the local Taiwanese military before China can get to it, and most of it is already in the process of being successfully transferred to the US. I also expect that most of the human talent would be taken to the US.
Why should China care, if they are mostly cut from the output of that anyway?
3) Even if the US did not directly intervene, the US and their allies would start massive rearmament and reindustrialisation programmes and maximally utilise their advantage in AI and other critical technologies in future.
Trump just asked for a $1.5T military budget. It's already happening.
4) Regarding point 4, if American AI victory is inevitable due to their computing advantage, China might still get a better deal in the current scenario, where it is perceived as merely an economic competitor and geopolitical challenger, rather than a direct adversary, as it would be in the event of an invasion of Taiwan.
American AI victory is not inevitable. And not taking this bet would relinquish China to the permanent undetclass of nations, which i'm sure Beijing doesn't want.
GPT-4 was pre-trained in 2022. GPT-4o was pre-trained in 2024. Since then, models likely have the same size. Clearly something is happening that no one wants to spend 100x more in a pre-train run. Likely because you need high-qualitt non-synthetic data.
Trade and invest in the U.S. is giving resources to the U.S. now in exchange for pieces of paper that might or might not be valuable in 10 years in a radical y different world.
Many many things in the world are explained by society having an unconscious visceral forecast of AGI timelines in the late 2020s. Many actors behaviors make more sense if you assume they have late 2020s timelines.
This is a bit "wtf happened in 1971?" I mean, the Intel 4004 was launched in 1971, the release of the first microprocessor. And I think what explains this is that this is all part of the same trend of Moore's Law pushing for automation, just that we are getting to the part of the exponential where the numbers get insane.