If you’d call that a superintelligent system, what would a human-level system be? Something which was as good as the best humans at some things, but only as good as the average human on most things?
Seems roughly correct, but most likely it will be superhuman at several things and worse than humans at many other things. It’s hard to be more precise than this unfortunately.
Do you think making it $2,000 or $20,000 would make a difference?
Yeah at $20,000 I start having trouble imagining when this might be used.
Is “Expensive AGI” a meaningfully different category of scenario from the usual AGI scenarios?
It doesn’t feel that different? Like, if that happened, probably the world doesn’t change much, we get the cost down, and then we have non-expensive AGI. Seems like a standard continuous takeoff world. Presumably there can’t be any hardware overhangs in such a world, though other kinds of overhangs (e.g. from recursive improvement) seem as likely as they are in other scenarios.
It’s probably better for safety because we get more experience working with powerful AI systems before they go about transforming the world.
I think the scenario you describe sounds sufficiently different to me to count as different. Like you say, we get more experience working with powerful AI systems because there’s a substantial period where they exist but are too expensive to transform the world.
My current view is that things will be crazier than this. Were we to get expensive AGI, I think the world would be transformed (in the relevant sense, i.e. it being too late for us to change the course of history) before the usual cost decreases kick in. Like, usually it takes at least a year for the price to drop by an order of magnitude, right? My intuition is that if we had GPT-6 costing $20,000 it would take less than two years for us to reach the point at which it’s too late.
As often happens, the responses to my question are helping me rethink how I should have phrased the question...
Seems roughly correct, but most likely it will be superhuman at several things and worse than humans at many other things. It’s hard to be more precise than this unfortunately.
Yeah at $20,000 I start having trouble imagining when this might be used.
It doesn’t feel that different? Like, if that happened, probably the world doesn’t change much, we get the cost down, and then we have non-expensive AGI. Seems like a standard continuous takeoff world. Presumably there can’t be any hardware overhangs in such a world, though other kinds of overhangs (e.g. from recursive improvement) seem as likely as they are in other scenarios.
It’s probably better for safety because we get more experience working with powerful AI systems before they go about transforming the world.
I think the scenario you describe sounds sufficiently different to me to count as different. Like you say, we get more experience working with powerful AI systems because there’s a substantial period where they exist but are too expensive to transform the world.
My current view is that things will be crazier than this. Were we to get expensive AGI, I think the world would be transformed (in the relevant sense, i.e. it being too late for us to change the course of history) before the usual cost decreases kick in. Like, usually it takes at least a year for the price to drop by an order of magnitude, right? My intuition is that if we had GPT-6 costing $20,000 it would take less than two years for us to reach the point at which it’s too late.
As often happens, the responses to my question are helping me rethink how I should have phrased the question...