3 ms·
Instead of paperclip maximization, our economy is hell-bent on matmul maximization. The crazy thing is, I’m not sure it’s crazy.
by twoodfin 10mo ago
Instead of paperclip maximization, our economy is hell-bent on matmul maximization.
The crazy thing is, I’m not sure it’s crazy.
- biophysboy 10mo agoIt does feel very brute force though, doesn't it? It feels like we should be able to guess the manifold that has all the important stuff for each question. But it doesn't seem like we can currently! Why not?
- glhaynes 10mo agoI’ll take the opposite side! This seems completely unprecedented. I have nearly no faith in any estimates of even the relatively near-term future.
- twoodfin 10mo agoRight! It seems to me that any range of uncertainty on aggregate demand is at orders of magnitude more than we could build even if we 10X’d the current madness. Pause all current advancement in GPU and model R&D. How much matmul would the world consume if everyone had all-you-can-eat access to January ‘26 frontier models at all-to-yourself performance levels at 0 incremental cost? Compare to, I dunno, unlimited pizza or unlimited electricity. Yes, if you’re smelting aluminum the latter would be a big deal. But a lot more people want to code SaaS faster and better, or have an omniscient personal assistant on call 24/7.
- kmeisthax 10mo agoCompute is a convergent instrumental goal. Any runaway paperclip maximizing AI is going to want lots of GPUs. And any runaway corporation trying to build an "aligned" runaway AI is going to try and feed it as many of them as possible.
- twoodfin 10mo agoOK, but why discount the simpler explanation that these tools are the most direct means for turning electricity into a wide range of economic value ever built, & thus demand is effectively unbounded?
- Avicebron 10mo agoIn concrete terms can you describe the exact kinds of economic value that isn't "decreases amount of money spent on people solving problems?"
- twoodfin 10mo agoThat’s exactly what it is. More $ output, less $ input. That’s the way progress happens.
- Avicebron 10mo agoAnd when less $ input results in less $ output because there isn't any more $ to input across a large enough swath of people?
- spwa4 10mo agoI believe most of the third world, more generally countries with an extreme difference between the rich and poor, most autocratic, illustrate the resut. (hell, they have to be: those rich can't give any control to those poor. That would destroy them) Oh and if you mean more practically: compounds with month-long hundreds of people parties tended to by thousands of servants, in huge stylish concrete hotels surrounded by a security force easily 50 times the local police department, and housing little better than huts around that, parents with children unable to afford basic medicine like glasses. Regularly on display in Egypt.
- rich_sasha 10mo agoIt is kind of terrible either way, I feel. We're making enormous investments, that require enormous profits to justify this. And it's not just big bad rich people doing this, I shudder to think what the exposure of my pension portfolio is to this stuff. So either there will be no enormous returns, big flop, big recession. Probably terrible for tech workers, because it is our employers who are most exposed. Or it will make enormous profits. But how? By replacing humans. If it is really worth all this money, then surely the owners of this stuff will suddenly own all the intellectual productivity in the world. And I have a feeling they won't really share it with the "share" holders.
- willis936 10mo agoThis is the the underlying reason why AI is unpopular. In a vacuum the tech is neat, but if you change the names and ignore all merit then this looks like a hostile takeover.