First: a group of 100 people can of course get more done over a month than an individual, by expending 100 times as many man-hours as the individual. (In fact, simple argument: anything an individual can do in a month a group of 100 can also do in a month by just having one group member do the thing independently. In practice this doesn’t always work because people get really stupid in groups and might not think to have one person do the thing independently, but I think the argument is still plenty strong.) The question is whether the group can get as much done without any individual person doing a very large chunk of the work; each person should only need to do a small/simple task. That’s the point of problem factorization.
Second: the relevant question is not whether there exist factorizable problems; they clearly exist. (Assembly lines are proof of existence.) The question is whether there do not exist unfactorizable problems—more precisely, whether alignment can be solved without running into a single subproblem which humans cannot factor without missing some crucial consideration.
For more info on the sort of things which drive my intuition here, see Coordination as a Scarce Resource. If I suddenly found out that none of the examples in that post actually happened, or that they were all extremely unusual, then I’d mainly be very confused, but that would be the sort of thing which would potentially end in changing my mind about this.
As one example: YCombinator companies have roughly linear correlation between exit value and number of employees, and basically all companies with $100MM+ exits have >100 employees. My impression is that there are very few companies with even $1MM revenue/employee (though I don’t have a data set easily available).
I don’t think this is especially relevant, but I disagree with this picture on two counts. First, I think valuation tends to cause hiring, not vice versa—for instance, in google the very large majority of employees do not work on search, and the non-search employees account for a tiny fraction of the company’s income (at least as of last time I checked, which was admittedly a while ago). Second, Instagram: IIRC the company had 13 employees when it was acquired by Facebook for $1B. I would guess that there are plenty of very small $100M companies, we just don’t hear about them as often because few people have friends who work at them and they don’t need to publicize to raise capital.
Thanks! The point about existence proofs is helpful.
After thinking about this more, I’m just kind of confused about the prompt: Aren’t big companies by definition working on problems that can be factored? Because if they weren’t, why would they hire additional people?
Two key points here.
First: a group of 100 people can of course get more done over a month than an individual, by expending 100 times as many man-hours as the individual. (In fact, simple argument: anything an individual can do in a month a group of 100 can also do in a month by just having one group member do the thing independently. In practice this doesn’t always work because people get really stupid in groups and might not think to have one person do the thing independently, but I think the argument is still plenty strong.) The question is whether the group can get as much done without any individual person doing a very large chunk of the work; each person should only need to do a small/simple task. That’s the point of problem factorization.
Second: the relevant question is not whether there exist factorizable problems; they clearly exist. (Assembly lines are proof of existence.) The question is whether there do not exist unfactorizable problems—more precisely, whether alignment can be solved without running into a single subproblem which humans cannot factor without missing some crucial consideration.
For more info on the sort of things which drive my intuition here, see Coordination as a Scarce Resource. If I suddenly found out that none of the examples in that post actually happened, or that they were all extremely unusual, then I’d mainly be very confused, but that would be the sort of thing which would potentially end in changing my mind about this.
I don’t think this is especially relevant, but I disagree with this picture on two counts. First, I think valuation tends to cause hiring, not vice versa—for instance, in google the very large majority of employees do not work on search, and the non-search employees account for a tiny fraction of the company’s income (at least as of last time I checked, which was admittedly a while ago). Second, Instagram: IIRC the company had 13 employees when it was acquired by Facebook for $1B. I would guess that there are plenty of very small $100M companies, we just don’t hear about them as often because few people have friends who work at them and they don’t need to publicize to raise capital.
Thanks! The point about existence proofs is helpful.
After thinking about this more, I’m just kind of confused about the prompt: Aren’t big companies by definition working on problems that can be factored? Because if they weren’t, why would they hire additional people?