Early: That comes from AIs that are just powerful enough to be extremely useful and dangerous-by-default (i.e. these AIs aren’t wildly superhuman).
Can you be more clearer this point? To operationalize this, I propose the following question: what is the fraction of world GDP you expect will be attributable to AI at the time we have these risky AIs that you are interested in?
For example, are you worried about AIs that will arise when AI is 1-10% of the economy, or more like 50%? 90%?
One operationalization is “these AIs are capable of speeding up ML R&D by 30x with less than a 2x increase in marginal costs”.
As in, if you have a team doing ML research, you can make them 30x faster with only <2x increase in cost by going from not using your powerful AIs to using them.
With these caveats:
The speed up is relative to the current status quo as of GPT-4.
The speed up is ignoring the “speed up” of “having better experiments to do due to access to better models” (so e.g., they would complete a fixed research task faster).
By “capable” of speeding things up this much, I mean that if AIs “wanted” to speed up this task and if we didn’t have any safety precautions slowing things down, we could get these speedups. (Of course, AIs might actively and successfully slow down certain types of research and we might have burdensome safety precautions.)
The 2x increase in marginal cost is ignoring potential inflation in the cost of compute (FLOP/$) and inflation in the cost of wages of ML researchers. Otherwise, I’m uncertain how exactly to model the situation. Maybe increase in wages and decrease in FLOP/$ cancel out? Idk.
It might be important that the speed up is amortized over a longer duration like 6 months to 1 year.
I’m uncertain what the economic impact of such systems will look like. I could imagine either massive (GDP has already grown >4x due to the total effects of AI) or only moderate (AIs haven’t yet been that widely deployed due to inference availability issues, so actual production hasn’t increased that much due to AI (<10%), though markets are pricing in AI being a really, really big deal).
So, it’s hard for me to predict the immediate impact on world GDP. After adaptation and broad deployment, systems of this level would likely have a massive effect on GDP.
Can you be more clearer this point? To operationalize this, I propose the following question: what is the fraction of world GDP you expect will be attributable to AI at the time we have these risky AIs that you are interested in?
For example, are you worried about AIs that will arise when AI is 1-10% of the economy, or more like 50%? 90%?
One operationalization is “these AIs are capable of speeding up ML R&D by 30x with less than a 2x increase in marginal costs”.
As in, if you have a team doing ML research, you can make them 30x faster with only <2x increase in cost by going from not using your powerful AIs to using them.
With these caveats:
The speed up is relative to the current status quo as of GPT-4.
The speed up is ignoring the “speed up” of “having better experiments to do due to access to better models” (so e.g., they would complete a fixed research task faster).
By “capable” of speeding things up this much, I mean that if AIs “wanted” to speed up this task and if we didn’t have any safety precautions slowing things down, we could get these speedups. (Of course, AIs might actively and successfully slow down certain types of research and we might have burdensome safety precautions.)
The 2x increase in marginal cost is ignoring potential inflation in the cost of compute (FLOP/$) and inflation in the cost of wages of ML researchers. Otherwise, I’m uncertain how exactly to model the situation. Maybe increase in wages and decrease in FLOP/$ cancel out? Idk.
It might be important that the speed up is amortized over a longer duration like 6 months to 1 year.
I’m uncertain what the economic impact of such systems will look like. I could imagine either massive (GDP has already grown >4x due to the total effects of AI) or only moderate (AIs haven’t yet been that widely deployed due to inference availability issues, so actual production hasn’t increased that much due to AI (<10%), though markets are pricing in AI being a really, really big deal).
So, it’s hard for me to predict the immediate impact on world GDP. After adaptation and broad deployment, systems of this level would likely have a massive effect on GDP.