Thanks for writing this—it’s very concrete and interesting.
Have you thought about using company market caps as an indicator of AGI nearness? I would guess that an AI index—maybe NVIDIA, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft—would look really significantly different in the two scenarios you paint. To control for general economic conditions, you could look at the those companies relative to the NASDAQ-100 (minus AI companies). An advantage of this is that it tracks a lot of different indicators, including ones that are really fuzzy or hard to discover, through the medium of market speculators. Another advantage is that it is a clear and easily measurable quantity. That makes it easy to make bets and create prediction markets around it.
Of course, there is weirdness around how we should expect the market to behave in the run-up to AGI, where wealth may become less relevant, etc. But I’d still expect the market to be significantly more bullish on AI stocks in the run-up to AGI, than in an AI fizzle/winter scenario.
Thanks for writing this—it’s very concrete and interesting.
Have you thought about using company market caps as an indicator of AGI nearness? I would guess that an AI index—maybe NVIDIA, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft—would look really significantly different in the two scenarios you paint. To control for general economic conditions, you could look at the those companies relative to the NASDAQ-100 (minus AI companies). An advantage of this is that it tracks a lot of different indicators, including ones that are really fuzzy or hard to discover, through the medium of market speculators. Another advantage is that it is a clear and easily measurable quantity. That makes it easy to make bets and create prediction markets around it.
Of course, there is weirdness around how we should expect the market to behave in the run-up to AGI, where wealth may become less relevant, etc. But I’d still expect the market to be significantly more bullish on AI stocks in the run-up to AGI, than in an AI fizzle/winter scenario.