A few weeks ago I did a quick calculation for the amount of digital suffering I expect in the short term, which probably gets at your question about these sizes, for the short term. tldr of my thinking on the topic:
There is currently a global compute stock of ~1.4e21 FLOP/s (each second, we can do about that many floating point operations).
It seems reasonable to expect this to grow ~40x in the next 10 years based on naively extrapolating current trends in spending and compute efficiency per dollar. That brings us to 1.6e23 FLOP/s in 2033.
Human brains do about 1e15 FLOP/s (each second, a human brain does about 1e15 floating point operations worth of computation)
We might naively assume that future AIs will have similar consciousness-compute efficiency to humans. We’ll also assume that 63% of the 2033 compute stock is being used to run such AIs (makes the numbers easier).
Then the number of human-consciousness-second-equivalent AIs that can be run each second in 2033 is 1e23 / 1e15 = 1e8, or 100 million.
For reference, there are probably around 31 billion land animals being factory farmed each second. I make a few adjustments based on brain size and guesses about the experience of suffering AIs and get that digital suffering in 2033 seems to be similar in scale to factory farming.
Overall my analysis is extremely uncertain, and I’m unsurprised if it’s off by 3 orders of magnitude in either direction. Also note that I am only looking at the short term.
You can read the slightly more thorough, but still extremely rough and likely wrong BOTEC here
A few weeks ago I did a quick calculation for the amount of digital suffering I expect in the short term, which probably gets at your question about these sizes, for the short term. tldr of my thinking on the topic:
There is currently a global compute stock of ~1.4e21 FLOP/s (each second, we can do about that many floating point operations).
It seems reasonable to expect this to grow ~40x in the next 10 years based on naively extrapolating current trends in spending and compute efficiency per dollar. That brings us to 1.6e23 FLOP/s in 2033.
Human brains do about 1e15 FLOP/s (each second, a human brain does about 1e15 floating point operations worth of computation)
We might naively assume that future AIs will have similar consciousness-compute efficiency to humans. We’ll also assume that 63% of the 2033 compute stock is being used to run such AIs (makes the numbers easier).
Then the number of human-consciousness-second-equivalent AIs that can be run each second in 2033 is 1e23 / 1e15 = 1e8, or 100 million.
For reference, there are probably around 31 billion land animals being factory farmed each second. I make a few adjustments based on brain size and guesses about the experience of suffering AIs and get that digital suffering in 2033 seems to be similar in scale to factory farming.
Overall my analysis is extremely uncertain, and I’m unsurprised if it’s off by 3 orders of magnitude in either direction. Also note that I am only looking at the short term.
You can read the slightly more thorough, but still extremely rough and likely wrong BOTEC here