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People really don't get it. The Frontier Labs' ability to make money right now is irrelevant. If you build the first AGI you win capitalism. That's what is at s

People really don't get it. The Frontier Labs' ability to make money right now is irrelevant. If you build the first AGI you win capitalism. That's what is at stake here. That's potentially worth Trillions/Quadrillions(infinite?) money. Everything else is noise.

Xiol32 2y ago
Why? Where does the money come from? What's the product? If AGI destroys millions of jobs, who is paying for products?
- vonneumannstan 2y ago
  Oh believe me I'm right there with you but in the few timelines we don't all die this is clearly what's at stake. Altman can crown himself Emperor of the Galaxy...
  - owebmaster 2y ago
    Emperor, right. 1 month in jail and he gets back to his senses.
myrmidon 2y ago
> If you build the first AGI you win capitalism. That's what is at stake here. Why? If you had a GPT version right now that was even more intelligent than an average human, what exactly would change? The big assumption is that you could leverage that into an even bigger lead, but this seems questionable to me-- just throwing twice the compute at it is not going to make it twice as clever. Considering recent efforts, throwing more man(?)-hours into self improvement is also highly likely to run into quickly diminishing returns. Sure, you might get significant market share for services that currently require a human-in-front-of-screen and nothing else, but what prevents your competition from building the exact same thing?
- vonneumannstan 2y ago
  >Why? If you had a GPT version right now that was even more intelligent than an average human, what exactly would change? This obviates all human labor that can be done on a PC. If you can't imagine how insane that is then I can't help you.
  - myrmidon 2y ago
    > This obviates all human labor that can be done on a PC Sure, this is massive for the actual people doing such things right now (designers, programmers, callcenter employees) because their work becomes almost worthless, and the impacted sector of our economy is pretty large. You can not hope to earn what a human used to get for the same work however, because that is not how markets work (and this should be very obvious on second though, for examples just consider how ChatGPT is not priced like a human personal assistent/concierge service, or how agriculture went from a "half the economy" status pre-industrialization to a reluctantly subsidised, barely profitable economical footnote nowadays). So AI is not "winning" capitalism-- because the piece of the economic pie that you can hope to get is not the size of the "human-in-front-of-screen" sector-- you are basically just gonna compete to provide computing services, just like AWS or OpenAI today (which certainly can be profitable, but not really in a capitalism-shattering way). Don't get me wrong-- I'm not saying that a human-level AI would not be an immensely impactful achievement with far reaching implications, but I think you are largely overestimating the expected economical gain for the "inventor".
    - vonneumannstan 2y ago
      I think you seriously lack imagination... You've read too much Tyler Cowen and imagine AGI only adding .5% to GDP per year lol. Instead of what it actually is which is the beginning of the Singularity.
      - myrmidon 2y ago
        > You've read too much Tyler Cowen and imagine AGI only adding .5% to GDP per year I did not know who Tyler Cowen is. I'm not making any assumptions about how much growth we would get from machine intelligence, I'm simply stating that the value you can expect from that whole new sector is gonna be much closer to the cost in silicon and energy to provide it than the former value of the human labor it replaces (history reinforces that view). In my view, building machine intelligence makes you into a (groundbreaking, innovative) commodity provider medium-term at best, not a god. I'm personally extremely skeptical of singularity scenarios in general. Most models of it implicitly assume a sub-exponential, somewhat proportional or even constant relation between achieved "intelligence/utility" and required energy (thanks to "self improvement"), which is an extremely flawed assumption in my view. But what kind of singularity do you actually believe in? I do agree that machine intelligence is a significant existential risk for our species, though.

Xiol32 2y ago

Why? Where does the money come from? What's the product? If AGI destroys millions of jobs, who is paying for products?

vonneumannstan 2y ago
Oh believe me I'm right there with you but in the few timelines we don't all die this is clearly what's at stake. Altman can crown himself Emperor of the Galaxy...
- owebmaster 2y ago
  Emperor, right. 1 month in jail and he gets back to his senses.

myrmidon 2y ago

> If you build the first AGI you win capitalism. That's what is at stake here. Why? If you had a GPT version right now that was even more intelligent than an average human, what exactly would change? The big assumption is that you could leverage that into an even bigger lead, but this seems questionable to me-- just throwing twice the compute at it is not going to make it twice as clever. Considering recent efforts, throwing more man(?)-hours into self improvement is also highly likely to run into quickly diminishing returns. Sure, you might get significant market share for services that currently require a human-in-front-of-screen and nothing else, but what prevents your competition from building the exact same thing?

vonneumannstan 2y ago
>Why? If you had a GPT version right now that was even more intelligent than an average human, what exactly would change? This obviates all human labor that can be done on a PC. If you can't imagine how insane that is then I can't help you.
- myrmidon 2y ago
  > This obviates all human labor that can be done on a PC Sure, this is massive for the actual people doing such things right now (designers, programmers, callcenter employees) because their work becomes almost worthless, and the impacted sector of our economy is pretty large. You can not hope to earn what a human used to get for the same work however, because that is not how markets work (and this should be very obvious on second though, for examples just consider how ChatGPT is not priced like a human personal assistent/concierge service, or how agriculture went from a "half the economy" status pre-industrialization to a reluctantly subsidised, barely profitable economical footnote nowadays). So AI is not "winning" capitalism-- because the piece of the economic pie that you can hope to get is not the size of the "human-in-front-of-screen" sector-- you are basically just gonna compete to provide computing services, just like AWS or OpenAI today (which certainly can be profitable, but not really in a capitalism-shattering way). Don't get me wrong-- I'm not saying that a human-level AI would not be an immensely impactful achievement with far reaching implications, but I think you are largely overestimating the expected economical gain for the "inventor".
  - vonneumannstan 2y ago
    I think you seriously lack imagination... You've read too much Tyler Cowen and imagine AGI only adding .5% to GDP per year lol. Instead of what it actually is which is the beginning of the Singularity.
    - myrmidon 2y ago
      > You've read too much Tyler Cowen and imagine AGI only adding .5% to GDP per year I did not know who Tyler Cowen is. I'm not making any assumptions about how much growth we would get from machine intelligence, I'm simply stating that the value you can expect from that whole new sector is gonna be much closer to the cost in silicon and energy to provide it than the former value of the human labor it replaces (history reinforces that view). In my view, building machine intelligence makes you into a (groundbreaking, innovative) commodity provider medium-term at best, not a god. I'm personally extremely skeptical of singularity scenarios in general. Most models of it implicitly assume a sub-exponential, somewhat proportional or even constant relation between achieved "intelligence/utility" and required energy (thanks to "self improvement"), which is an extremely flawed assumption in my view. But what kind of singularity do you actually believe in? I do agree that machine intelligence is a significant existential risk for our species, though.