I think there’s a problem with linking together AI research progress and economic output. The AI research → economic value pipeline takes some time, the research AI models are not necessarily trivially adapted to generating economic value, and businesses need to actually figure out how to use AIs in their workflows. This means that in a gradual take-off world, where unintuitively AI research is happening faster pre-takeoff, the mechanisms which convert AI progress into value might not kickoff soon enough for us to observe them, for instance deepmind might be making so much progress so fast that it doesn’t make sense to stop to monetize their current models because they know that they’ll get better ones very soon. We can already notice this from the fact that there is so much economic low-hanging fruit remaining for current AI to pluck. It’s in the sudden take-off world, where progress pre-takeoff is slower, that it makes sense to invest ressources to monetize your current models because you expect them to last some time before being deprecated.
I think there’s a problem with linking together AI research progress and economic output. The AI research → economic value pipeline takes some time, the research AI models are not necessarily trivially adapted to generating economic value, and businesses need to actually figure out how to use AIs in their workflows. This means that in a gradual take-off world, where unintuitively AI research is happening faster pre-takeoff, the mechanisms which convert AI progress into value might not kickoff soon enough for us to observe them, for instance deepmind might be making so much progress so fast that it doesn’t make sense to stop to monetize their current models because they know that they’ll get better ones very soon. We can already notice this from the fact that there is so much economic low-hanging fruit remaining for current AI to pluck. It’s in the sudden take-off world, where progress pre-takeoff is slower, that it makes sense to invest ressources to monetize your current models because you expect them to last some time before being deprecated.
Yeah. I much prefer the take-off definitions which use capabilities rather than GDP (or something more wholistic like Daniel’s post.)