Ok, but for how long?
If the situation holds for only 3 months, and then the accelerated R&D gives us a huge drop in costs, then the strategic outcomes seem pretty similar.
If there continues to be a useful peak capability only achievable with expensive inference, like the 10x human cost, and there are weaker human-skill-at-minimum available for 0.01x human cost, then it may be interesting to consider which tasks will benefit more from a large number of moderately good workers vs a small number of excellent workers.
Also worth considering is speed. In a lot of cases, it is possible to set things up to run slower-but-cheaper on less or cheaper hardware. Or to pay more, and have things run in as highly parallelized a manner as possible on the most expensive hardware. Usually maximizing speed comes with some cost overhead. So then you also need to consider whether it’s worth having more of the work be done in serial by a smaller number of faster models...
For certain tasks, particularly competitive ones like sports or combat, speed can be a critical factor and is worth sacrificing peak intelligence for. Obviously, for long horizon strategic planning, it’s the other way around.
I don’t expect this to continue for very long. 3 months (or less) seems plausible. I really should have mentioned this in the post. I’ve now edited it in.
then the strategic outcomes seem pretty similar
I don’t think so. In particular once the costs drop you might be able to run substantially superhuman systems at the same cost that you could previously run systems that can “merely” automate away top human experts.
Ok, but for how long? If the situation holds for only 3 months, and then the accelerated R&D gives us a huge drop in costs, then the strategic outcomes seem pretty similar.
If there continues to be a useful peak capability only achievable with expensive inference, like the 10x human cost, and there are weaker human-skill-at-minimum available for 0.01x human cost, then it may be interesting to consider which tasks will benefit more from a large number of moderately good workers vs a small number of excellent workers.
Also worth considering is speed. In a lot of cases, it is possible to set things up to run slower-but-cheaper on less or cheaper hardware. Or to pay more, and have things run in as highly parallelized a manner as possible on the most expensive hardware. Usually maximizing speed comes with some cost overhead. So then you also need to consider whether it’s worth having more of the work be done in serial by a smaller number of faster models...
For certain tasks, particularly competitive ones like sports or combat, speed can be a critical factor and is worth sacrificing peak intelligence for. Obviously, for long horizon strategic planning, it’s the other way around.
I don’t expect this to continue for very long. 3 months (or less) seems plausible. I really should have mentioned this in the post. I’ve now edited it in.
I don’t think so. In particular once the costs drop you might be able to run substantially superhuman systems at the same cost that you could previously run systems that can “merely” automate away top human experts.