The name and description of the paralllelization penalty makes it sound like it’s entirely about parallelization—“the penalty to concurrent R&D efforts.” But then the math makes it sound like it’s about more than that—“The ouputs of the hardware and software production function R&D get raised to this penalty before being aggregated to the cumulative total.”
What if we produce an AI system that assists human researchers in doing their research, (say) by automating the coding? And suppose that is, like, 50% of the research cycle, so that now there is the same number of researchers but they are all going 2x faster?
This feels like a case where there is no additional parallelization happening, just a straightforward speedup. So the parallelization penalty shouldn’t be relevant. It feels like we shouldn’t model this as equivalent to increasing the size of the population of researchers.
The name and description of the paralllelization penalty makes it sound like it’s entirely about parallelization—“the penalty to concurrent R&D efforts.” But then the math makes it sound like it’s about more than that—“The ouputs of the hardware and software production function R&D get raised to this penalty before being aggregated to the cumulative total.”
What if we produce an AI system that assists human researchers in doing their research, (say) by automating the coding? And suppose that is, like, 50% of the research cycle, so that now there is the same number of researchers but they are all going 2x faster?
This feels like a case where there is no additional parallelization happening, just a straightforward speedup. So the parallelization penalty shouldn’t be relevant. It feels like we shouldn’t model this as equivalent to increasing the size of the population of researchers.