Currently big companies struggle to hire and correctly promote talent for the reasons discussed in my post, whereas AI talent will be easier to find/hire/replicate given only capital & legible info
To the extent that AI ability scales with resources (potentially boosted by inference-time compute, and if SOTA models are no longer available to the public), then better-resourced actors have better galaxy brains
Superhuman intelligence and organisational ability in AIs will mean less bureaucratic rot and communication bandwidth problems in large orgs, compared to orgs made out of human brain -sized chunks, reducing the costs of scale
Imagine for example the world where software engineering is incredibly cheap. You can start a software company very easily, yes, but Google can monitor the web for any company that makes revenue off of software, instantly clone the functionality (because software engineering is just a turn-the-crank-on-the-LLM thing now) and combine it with their platform advantage and existing products and distribution channels. Whereas right now, it would cost Google a lot of precious human time and focus to try to even monitor all the developing startups, let alone launch a competing product for each one. Of course, it might be that Google itself is too bureaucratic and slow to ever do this, but someone else will then take this strategy.
C.f. the oft-quoted thing about how the startup challenge is getting to distribution before the incumbents get to distribution. But if the innovation is engineering, and the engineering is trivial, how do you get time to get distribution right?
(Interestingly, as I’m describing it above the most key thing is not so much capital intensivity, and more just that innovation/engineering is no longer a source of differential advantage because everyone can do it with their AIs really well)
There’s definitely a chance that there’s some “crack” in this, either from the economics or the nature of AI performance or some interaction. In particular, as I mentioned at the end, I don’t think modelling the AI as an approaching blank wall of complete perfect intelligence all-obsoleting intelligence is the right model for short to medium -term dynamics. Would be very curious if you have thoughts.
For example:
Currently big companies struggle to hire and correctly promote talent for the reasons discussed in my post, whereas AI talent will be easier to find/hire/replicate given only capital & legible info
To the extent that AI ability scales with resources (potentially boosted by inference-time compute, and if SOTA models are no longer available to the public), then better-resourced actors have better galaxy brains
Superhuman intelligence and organisational ability in AIs will mean less bureaucratic rot and communication bandwidth problems in large orgs, compared to orgs made out of human brain -sized chunks, reducing the costs of scale
Imagine for example the world where software engineering is incredibly cheap. You can start a software company very easily, yes, but Google can monitor the web for any company that makes revenue off of software, instantly clone the functionality (because software engineering is just a turn-the-crank-on-the-LLM thing now) and combine it with their platform advantage and existing products and distribution channels. Whereas right now, it would cost Google a lot of precious human time and focus to try to even monitor all the developing startups, let alone launch a competing product for each one. Of course, it might be that Google itself is too bureaucratic and slow to ever do this, but someone else will then take this strategy.
C.f. the oft-quoted thing about how the startup challenge is getting to distribution before the incumbents get to distribution. But if the innovation is engineering, and the engineering is trivial, how do you get time to get distribution right?
(Interestingly, as I’m describing it above the most key thing is not so much capital intensivity, and more just that innovation/engineering is no longer a source of differential advantage because everyone can do it with their AIs really well)
There’s definitely a chance that there’s some “crack” in this, either from the economics or the nature of AI performance or some interaction. In particular, as I mentioned at the end, I don’t think modelling the AI as an approaching blank wall of complete perfect intelligence all-obsoleting intelligence is the right model for short to medium -term dynamics. Would be very curious if you have thoughts.