Do you have any material on this? It sounds plausible to me but I couldn’t find anything with a quick search.
Nope, it’s just an unsubstantiated guess based on seeing what small teams can build today vs 30 years ago. Also based on the massive improvement in open-source libraries and tooling compared to then. Today’s developers can work faster at higher levels of abstraction compared to folks back then.
In this world we have AIs that cheaply automate half of work. That seems like it would have immense economic value and promise, enough to inspire massive new investments in AI companies....
Ah, I think we have a crux here. I think that, if you could hire—for the same price as a human—a human-level AGI, that would indeed change things a lot. I’d reckon the AGI would have a 3-4x productivity boost from being able to work 24⁄7, and would be perfectly obedient, wouldn’t be limited to working in a single field, could more easily transfer knowledge to other AIs, could be backed up and/or replicated, wouldn’t need an office or a fun work environment, can be “hired” or “fired” ~instantly without difficulty, etc.
That feels somehow beside the point, though. I think in any such scenario, there’s also going to be very cheap AIs with sub-human intelligence that would have broad economic impact too.
Absolutely agree. AI and AGI will likely provide immense economic value even before the threshold of transformative AGI is crossed.
Still, supposing that AI research today is:
50⁄50 mix of capital and labor
faces diminishing returns
and has elastic demand
...then even a 4x labor productivity boost may not be all that path-breaking when you zoom out enough. Things will speed up, surely, but they might won’t create transformative AGI overnight. Even AGI researchers will need time and compute to do their experiments.
Nope, it’s just an unsubstantiated guess based on seeing what small teams can build today vs 30 years ago. Also based on the massive improvement in open-source libraries and tooling compared to then. Today’s developers can work faster at higher levels of abstraction compared to folks back then.
Absolutely agree. AI and AGI will likely provide immense economic value even before the threshold of transformative AGI is crossed.
Still, supposing that AI research today is:
50⁄50 mix of capital and labor
faces diminishing returns
and has elastic demand
...then even a 4x labor productivity boost may not be all that path-breaking when you zoom out enough. Things will speed up, surely, but they might won’t create transformative AGI overnight. Even AGI researchers will need time and compute to do their experiments.