economic recession and subsequent reduction in speculative research, including towards AGI, seems very plausible
AI (by which I mean, like, big neural networks and whatever) is not that economically useful right now. furthermore, current usage figures are likely an overestimate of true economic usefulness because a very large fraction of it is likely to be bubbly spending that will itself dry up if there is a recession (legacy companies putting LLMs into things to be cool, startups that are burning money without PMF, consumers with disposable income to spend on entertainment).
it will probably still be profitable to develop AI tech, but things will be much more tethered to consumer usefulness.
this probably doesn’t set AGI back that much but I think people are heavily underrating this as a possibility. it also probably heavily impacts the amount of alignment work done at labs.
for a sense of scale of just how bubbly things can get: Bitcoin has a market cap of ~1T, and the entirety of crypto ~2T. Crypto does produce some amount of real value, but probably on the order of magnitude of 1% that market cap. So it’s not at all unheard of for speculation to account for literally trillions of dollars of map (or ~tens of billions of earnings per year, at a reasonable P/E ratio)
I will say that crypto is a pretty pathological case where virtually all the benefit is speculation, because in order to deliver on anything real, they’d have to get rid of the money element in it, it’s thankfully pretty rare for entire industries to be outright scams/speculation opportunities.
economic recession and subsequent reduction in speculative research, including towards AGI, seems very plausible
AI (by which I mean, like, big neural networks and whatever) is not that economically useful right now. furthermore, current usage figures are likely an overestimate of true economic usefulness because a very large fraction of it is likely to be bubbly spending that will itself dry up if there is a recession (legacy companies putting LLMs into things to be cool, startups that are burning money without PMF, consumers with disposable income to spend on entertainment).
it will probably still be profitable to develop AI tech, but things will be much more tethered to consumer usefulness.
this probably doesn’t set AGI back that much but I think people are heavily underrating this as a possibility. it also probably heavily impacts the amount of alignment work done at labs.
for a sense of scale of just how bubbly things can get: Bitcoin has a market cap of ~1T, and the entirety of crypto ~2T. Crypto does produce some amount of real value, but probably on the order of magnitude of 1% that market cap. So it’s not at all unheard of for speculation to account for literally trillions of dollars of map (or ~tens of billions of earnings per year, at a reasonable P/E ratio)
I will say that crypto is a pretty pathological case where virtually all the benefit is speculation, because in order to deliver on anything real, they’d have to get rid of the money element in it, it’s thankfully pretty rare for entire industries to be outright scams/speculation opportunities.
say more about what you expect here?
investment in anything speculative, including alignment, and AGI research, is likely to decrease if the economy is not doing great