Let me try and summarise what I think is the high-level dynamic driving the result, and you can correct me if I’m confused.
CES in compute.
Compute has become cheaper while wages have stayed ~constant. The economic model then implies that:
If compute and labour were complements, then labs would spend a greater fraction of their research budgets on labour. (This prevents labour from becoming a bottleneck as compute becomes cheaper.)
Labs aren’t doing this, suggesting that compute and labour are substitutes.
CES in frontier experiments.
Frontier experiments have become more expensive while wages have stayed ~constant. The economic model then implies that:
If compute and labour were complements, then labs would spend a greater fraction of their research budgets on compute. (This relieves the key bottleneck of expensive frontier experiments.)
Labs are indeed doing this, suggesting that compute and labour are indeed complements.
(Though your ‘Research compute per employee’ data shows they’re not doing that much since 2018, so the argument against the intelligence explosion is weaker here than I’d have expected.)
Thanks for this!
Let me try and summarise what I think is the high-level dynamic driving the result, and you can correct me if I’m confused.
CES in compute.
Compute has become cheaper while wages have stayed ~constant. The economic model then implies that:
If compute and labour were complements, then labs would spend a greater fraction of their research budgets on labour. (This prevents labour from becoming a bottleneck as compute becomes cheaper.)
Labs aren’t doing this, suggesting that compute and labour are substitutes.
CES in frontier experiments.
Frontier experiments have become more expensive while wages have stayed ~constant. The economic model then implies that:
If compute and labour were complements, then labs would spend a greater fraction of their research budgets on compute. (This relieves the key bottleneck of expensive frontier experiments.)
Labs are indeed doing this, suggesting that compute and labour are indeed complements.
(Though your ‘Research compute per employee’ data shows they’re not doing that much since 2018, so the argument against the intelligence explosion is weaker here than I’d have expected.)
Yep, I think this gets the high-level dynamics driving the results right.