I believe the central impact will be a powerful compression of knowledge and a flood of legibility, which will be available to institutions and leadership first. Examples include:
Speechwriting
Report summarization
Report generation
Even the higher number, like $20,000 per page, is a good deal for something like Wikipedia, where the page is available to millions of readers, or for things like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. This will have a big impact on:
Online encyclopedias
Online textbooks
While this could easily be used to generate high-quality propaganda, I feel like it still weighs much more heavily in favor of the truth. This is because bullshit’s biggest advantage is that is is fast, cheap and easy to vary, whereas reality is inflexible and we comprehend it slowly. But under the proposed conditions, advanced bullshit and the truth cost the same amount, and have a similar speed. This leaves reality’s inflexible pressure on every dimension of every problem a decisive advantage in favor of the truth. This has a big impact on things like:
Any given prediction
Project proposals
Especially if it is at the lower end of the price scale, it becomes trivial to feed it multiple prompts and get multiple interpretations of the same question. This will give us a lot of information both in terms of compression and also in terms of method, which will cause us to be able to redirect resources into the most successful methods, and also to drop inefficient ones. I further expect this to be very transparent very quickly, though mechanisms like:
Finance
Sports betting
It will see heavy use by the intelligence community. A huge problem we have in the United States is our general lack of language capability; for example if GPT-6 knows Mandarin as well as any Mandarin speaker, and translates to English as well as any translator, then suddenly we get through the bottleneck and gain access to good information about Chinese attitudes. I expect this same mechanism will make foreign investment much more attractive almost universally, since domestic and foreign firms will now be working on an almost level playing field in any country with widespread internet access. If this prediction holds, I expect a large boom in investment in otherwise underdeveloped countries, because the opportunities will finally be legible.
Another interesting detail is that if GPT-6 can provide the best summaries of the available knowledge, this means that most of the world’s institutions will then be working from a much more uniform knowledge base than we do currently. My initial reaction was that this is clearly for the best because the biggest roadblock to coordination is getting on the same page with the other stakeholders, but it also occurs to me that it makes transparent to everyone the cases where certain stakeholders have an untenable position. I suspect this in turn makes it more likely that some parties get the screws put to them, and further when they a) understand their own position and b) understand that everyone else understands it, they are more likely to try something radical to shift the outcome. Consider North Korea, for example.
I believe the central impact will be a powerful compression of knowledge and a flood of legibility, which will be available to institutions and leadership first. Examples include:
Speechwriting
Report summarization
Report generation
Even the higher number, like $20,000 per page, is a good deal for something like Wikipedia, where the page is available to millions of readers, or for things like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. This will have a big impact on:
Online encyclopedias
Online textbooks
While this could easily be used to generate high-quality propaganda, I feel like it still weighs much more heavily in favor of the truth. This is because bullshit’s biggest advantage is that is is fast, cheap and easy to vary, whereas reality is inflexible and we comprehend it slowly. But under the proposed conditions, advanced bullshit and the truth cost the same amount, and have a similar speed. This leaves reality’s inflexible pressure on every dimension of every problem a decisive advantage in favor of the truth. This has a big impact on things like:
Any given prediction
Project proposals
Especially if it is at the lower end of the price scale, it becomes trivial to feed it multiple prompts and get multiple interpretations of the same question. This will give us a lot of information both in terms of compression and also in terms of method, which will cause us to be able to redirect resources into the most successful methods, and also to drop inefficient ones. I further expect this to be very transparent very quickly, though mechanisms like:
Finance
Sports betting
It will see heavy use by the intelligence community. A huge problem we have in the United States is our general lack of language capability; for example if GPT-6 knows Mandarin as well as any Mandarin speaker, and translates to English as well as any translator, then suddenly we get through the bottleneck and gain access to good information about Chinese attitudes. I expect this same mechanism will make foreign investment much more attractive almost universally, since domestic and foreign firms will now be working on an almost level playing field in any country with widespread internet access. If this prediction holds, I expect a large boom in investment in otherwise underdeveloped countries, because the opportunities will finally be legible.
Another interesting detail is that if GPT-6 can provide the best summaries of the available knowledge, this means that most of the world’s institutions will then be working from a much more uniform knowledge base than we do currently. My initial reaction was that this is clearly for the best because the biggest roadblock to coordination is getting on the same page with the other stakeholders, but it also occurs to me that it makes transparent to everyone the cases where certain stakeholders have an untenable position. I suspect this in turn makes it more likely that some parties get the screws put to them, and further when they a) understand their own position and b) understand that everyone else understands it, they are more likely to try something radical to shift the outcome. Consider North Korea, for example.