I think “team uses Codex to be 3x more productive” is more like the kind of thing Robin is talking about than the kind of thing Eliezer is talking about (e.g. see the discussion of UberTool, or just read the foom debate overall). And if you replace 3x with a more realistic number, and consider the fact that right now everyone is definitely selling that as a product rather than exclusively using it internally as a tool, then it’s even more like Robin’s story.
Everyone involved believes in the possibility of tech startups, and I’m not even sure if they have different views about the expected returns to startup founders. The 10 people who start an AI startup can make a lot of money, and will typically grow to a large scale (with significant dilution, but still quite a lot of influence for founders) before they make their most impressive AI systems.
I think this kind of discussion seems pretty unproductive, and it mostly just reinforces the OP’s point that people should actually predict something about the world if we want this kind of discussion to be remotely useful for deciding how to change beliefs as new evidence comes in (at least about what people / models / reasoning strategies work well). If you want to state any predictions about the next 5 years I’m happy to disagree with them.
The kinds of thing I expect are that (i) big models will still be where it’s at, (ii) compute budgets and team sizes continue to grow, (iii) improvements from cleverness continue to shrink, (iv) influence held by individual researchers grows in absolute terms but continues to shrink in relative terms, (v) AI tools become 2x more useful over more like a year than a week, (vi) AI contributions to AI R&D look similar to human contributions in various ways. Happy to put #s on those if you want to disagree on any. Places where I agree with the foom story are that I expect AI to be applied differentially to AI R&D, I expect the productivity of individual AI systems to scale relatively rapidly with compute and R&D investment, I expect overall progress to qualitatively be large, and so on.
I think “team uses Codex to be 3x more productive” is more like the kind of thing Robin is talking about than the kind of thing Eliezer is talking about (e.g. see the discussion of UberTool, or just read the foom debate overall). And if you replace 3x with a more realistic number, and consider the fact that right now everyone is definitely selling that as a product rather than exclusively using it internally as a tool, then it’s even more like Robin’s story.
Everyone involved believes in the possibility of tech startups, and I’m not even sure if they have different views about the expected returns to startup founders. The 10 people who start an AI startup can make a lot of money, and will typically grow to a large scale (with significant dilution, but still quite a lot of influence for founders) before they make their most impressive AI systems.
I think this kind of discussion seems pretty unproductive, and it mostly just reinforces the OP’s point that people should actually predict something about the world if we want this kind of discussion to be remotely useful for deciding how to change beliefs as new evidence comes in (at least about what people / models / reasoning strategies work well). If you want to state any predictions about the next 5 years I’m happy to disagree with them.
The kinds of thing I expect are that (i) big models will still be where it’s at, (ii) compute budgets and team sizes continue to grow, (iii) improvements from cleverness continue to shrink, (iv) influence held by individual researchers grows in absolute terms but continues to shrink in relative terms, (v) AI tools become 2x more useful over more like a year than a week, (vi) AI contributions to AI R&D look similar to human contributions in various ways. Happy to put #s on those if you want to disagree on any. Places where I agree with the foom story are that I expect AI to be applied differentially to AI R&D, I expect the productivity of individual AI systems to scale relatively rapidly with compute and R&D investment, I expect overall progress to qualitatively be large, and so on.
Yeah, I think this is fair. I’ll see whether I can come up with some good operationalizations.