I think you are underconfident about the fact that almost all AI profits will come from areas that had almost-as-much profit in recent years. So we could bet about where AI profits are in the near term, or try to generalize this.
I wouldn’t be especially surprised by waifutechnology or machine translation jumping to newly accessible domains (the thing I care about and you shrug about (until the world ends)), but is that likely to exhibit a visible economic discontinuity in profits (which you care about and I shrug about (until the world ends))? There’s apparently already mass-scale deployment of waifutech in China to forlorn male teenagers, so maybe you’ll say the profits were already precedented. Google offers machine translation now, even though they don’t make much obvious measurable profit on that, but maybe you’ll want to say that however much Google spends on that, they must rationally anticipate at least that much added revenue. Or perhaps you want to say that “almost all AI profits” will come from robotics over the same period. Or maybe I misunderstand your viewpoint, and if you said something concrete about the stuff you care about, I would manage to disagree with that; or maybe you think that waifutech suddenly getting much more charming with the next generation of text transformers is something you already know enough to rule out; or maybe you think that 2024′s waifutech should definitely be able to do some observable surface-level thing it can’t do now.
I’d be happy to disagree about romantic chatbots or machine translation. I’d have to look into it more to get a detailed sense in either, but I can guess. I’m not sure what “wouldn’t be especially surprised” means, I think to actually get disagreements we need way more resolution than that so one question is whether you are willing to play ball (since presumably you’d also have to looking into to get a more detailed sense). Maybe we could save labor if people would point out the empirical facts we’re missing and we can revise in light of that, but we’d still need more resolution. (That said: what’s up for grabs here are predictions about the future, not present.)
I’d guess that machine translation is currently something like $100M/year in value, and will scale up more like 2x/year than 10x/year as DL improves (e.g. most of the total log increase will be in years with <3x increase rather than >3x increase, and 3 is like the 60th percentile of the number for which that inequality is tight).
I’d guess that increasing deployment of romantic chatbots will end up with technical change happening first followed by social change second, so the speed of deployment and change will depend on the speed of social change. At early stages of the social change you will likely see much large investment in fine-tuning for this use case, and the results will be impressive as you shift from random folks doing it to actual serious efforts. The fact that it’s driven by social rather than technical change means it could proceed at very different paces in different countries. I don’t expect anyone to make a lot of profit from this before self-driving cars, for example I’d be pretty surprised if this surpassed $1B/year of revenue before self-driving cars passed $10B/year of revenue. I have no idea what’s happening in China. It would be fairly surprising to me if there was currently an actually-compelling version of the technology—which we could try operationalize as something like how bad your best available romantic relationship with humans has to be, or how lonely you’d have to be, or how short-sighted you’d have to be, before it’s appealing. I don’t have strong views about a mediocre product with low activation energy that’s nevertheless used by many (e.g. in the same way we see lots of games with mediocre hedonic value and high uptake, or lots of passive gambling).
Thanks for continuing to try on this! Without having spent a lot of labor myself on looking into self-driving cars, I think my sheer impression would be that we’ll get $1B/yr waifutech before we get AI freedom-of-the-road; though I do note again that current self-driving tech would be more than sufficient for $10B/yr revenue if people built new cities around the AI tech level, so I worry a bit about some restricted use-case of self-driving tech that is basically possible with current tech finding some less regulated niche worth a trivial $10B/yr. I also remark that I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that waifutech is already past $1B/yr in China, but I haven’t looked into things there. I don’t expect the waifutech to transcend my own standards for mediocrity, but something has to be pretty good before I call it more than mediocre; do you think there’s particular things that waifutech won’t be able to do?
My model permits large jumps in ML translation adoption; it is much less clear about whether anyone will be able to build a market moat and charge big prices for it. Do you have a similar intuition about # of users increasing gradually, not just revenue increasing gradually?
I think we’re still at the level of just drawing images about the future, so that anybody who came back in 5 years could try to figure out who sounded right, at all, rather than assembling a decent portfolio of bets; but I also think that just having images versus no images is a lot of progress.
Yes, I think that value added by automated translation will follow a similar pattern. Number of words translated is more sensitive to how you count and random nonsense, as is number of “users” which has even more definitional issues.
You can state a prediction about self-driving cars in any way you want. The obvious thing is to talk about programs similar to the existing self-driving taxi pilots (e.g. Waymo One) and ask when they do $X of revenue per year, or when $X of self-driving trucking is done per year. (I don’t know what AI freedom-of-the-road means, do you mean something significantly more ambitious than self-driving trucks or taxis?)
Man, the problem is that you say the “jump to newly accessible domains” will be the thing that lets you take over the world. So what’s up for dispute is the prototype being enough to take over the world rather than years of progress by a giant lab on top of the prototype. It doesn’t help if you say “I expect new things to sometimes become possible” if you don’t further say something about the impact of the very early versions of the product.
Maybe you’ll want to say that however much Google spends on that, they must rationally anticipate at least that much added revenue
If e.g. people were spending $1B/year developing a technology, and then after a while it jumps from 0/year to $1B/year of profit, I’m not that surprised. (Note that machine translation is radically smaller than this, I don’t know the numbers.)
I do suspect they could have rolled out a crappy version earlier, perhaps by significantly changing their project. But why would they necessarily bother doing that? For me this isn’t violating any of the principles that make your stories sound so crazy. The crazy part is someone spending $1B and then generating $100B/year in revenue (much less $100M and then taking over the world).
(Note: it is surprising if an industry is spending $10T/year on R&D and then jumps from $1T --> $10T of revenue in one year in a world that isn’t yet growing crazily. The surprising depends a lot on the numbers involved, and in particular on how valuable it would have been to deploy a worse version earlier and how hard it is to raise money at different scales.)
The crazy part is someone spending $1B and then generating $100B/year in revenue (much less $100M and then taking over the world).
Would you say that this is a good description of Suddenly Hominids but you don’t expect that to happen again, or that this is a bad description of hominids?
It’s not a description of hominids at all, no one spent any money on R&D.
I think there are analogies where this would be analogous to hominids (which I think are silly, as we discuss in the next part of this transcript). And there are analogies where this is a bad description of hominids (which I prefer).
Spending money on R&D is essentially the expenditure of resources in order to explore and optimize over a promising design space, right? That seems like a good description of what natural selection did in the case of hominids. I imagine this still sounds silly to you, but I’m not sure why. My guess is that you think natural selection isn’t relevantly similar because it didn’t deliberately plan to allocate resources as part of a long bet that it would pay off big.
I think natural selection has lots of similarities to R&D, but (i) there are lots of ways of drawing the analogy, (ii) some important features of R&D are missing in evolution, including some really important ones for fast takeoff arguments (like the existence of actors who think ahead).
If someones wants to spell out why they think evolution of hominids means takeoff is fast then I’m usually happy to explain why I disagree with their particular analogy. I think this happens in the next discord log between me and Eliezer.
I wouldn’t be especially surprised by waifutechnology or machine translation jumping to newly accessible domains (the thing I care about and you shrug about (until the world ends)), but is that likely to exhibit a visible economic discontinuity in profits (which you care about and I shrug about (until the world ends))? There’s apparently already mass-scale deployment of waifutech in China to forlorn male teenagers, so maybe you’ll say the profits were already precedented. Google offers machine translation now, even though they don’t make much obvious measurable profit on that, but maybe you’ll want to say that however much Google spends on that, they must rationally anticipate at least that much added revenue. Or perhaps you want to say that “almost all AI profits” will come from robotics over the same period. Or maybe I misunderstand your viewpoint, and if you said something concrete about the stuff you care about, I would manage to disagree with that; or maybe you think that waifutech suddenly getting much more charming with the next generation of text transformers is something you already know enough to rule out; or maybe you think that 2024′s waifutech should definitely be able to do some observable surface-level thing it can’t do now.
I’d be happy to disagree about romantic chatbots or machine translation. I’d have to look into it more to get a detailed sense in either, but I can guess. I’m not sure what “wouldn’t be especially surprised” means, I think to actually get disagreements we need way more resolution than that so one question is whether you are willing to play ball (since presumably you’d also have to looking into to get a more detailed sense). Maybe we could save labor if people would point out the empirical facts we’re missing and we can revise in light of that, but we’d still need more resolution. (That said: what’s up for grabs here are predictions about the future, not present.)
I’d guess that machine translation is currently something like $100M/year in value, and will scale up more like 2x/year than 10x/year as DL improves (e.g. most of the total log increase will be in years with <3x increase rather than >3x increase, and 3 is like the 60th percentile of the number for which that inequality is tight).
I’d guess that increasing deployment of romantic chatbots will end up with technical change happening first followed by social change second, so the speed of deployment and change will depend on the speed of social change. At early stages of the social change you will likely see much large investment in fine-tuning for this use case, and the results will be impressive as you shift from random folks doing it to actual serious efforts. The fact that it’s driven by social rather than technical change means it could proceed at very different paces in different countries. I don’t expect anyone to make a lot of profit from this before self-driving cars, for example I’d be pretty surprised if this surpassed $1B/year of revenue before self-driving cars passed $10B/year of revenue. I have no idea what’s happening in China. It would be fairly surprising to me if there was currently an actually-compelling version of the technology—which we could try operationalize as something like how bad your best available romantic relationship with humans has to be, or how lonely you’d have to be, or how short-sighted you’d have to be, before it’s appealing. I don’t have strong views about a mediocre product with low activation energy that’s nevertheless used by many (e.g. in the same way we see lots of games with mediocre hedonic value and high uptake, or lots of passive gambling).
Thanks for continuing to try on this! Without having spent a lot of labor myself on looking into self-driving cars, I think my sheer impression would be that we’ll get $1B/yr waifutech before we get AI freedom-of-the-road; though I do note again that current self-driving tech would be more than sufficient for $10B/yr revenue if people built new cities around the AI tech level, so I worry a bit about some restricted use-case of self-driving tech that is basically possible with current tech finding some less regulated niche worth a trivial $10B/yr. I also remark that I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that waifutech is already past $1B/yr in China, but I haven’t looked into things there. I don’t expect the waifutech to transcend my own standards for mediocrity, but something has to be pretty good before I call it more than mediocre; do you think there’s particular things that waifutech won’t be able to do?
My model permits large jumps in ML translation adoption; it is much less clear about whether anyone will be able to build a market moat and charge big prices for it. Do you have a similar intuition about # of users increasing gradually, not just revenue increasing gradually?
I think we’re still at the level of just drawing images about the future, so that anybody who came back in 5 years could try to figure out who sounded right, at all, rather than assembling a decent portfolio of bets; but I also think that just having images versus no images is a lot of progress.
Yes, I think that value added by automated translation will follow a similar pattern. Number of words translated is more sensitive to how you count and random nonsense, as is number of “users” which has even more definitional issues.
You can state a prediction about self-driving cars in any way you want. The obvious thing is to talk about programs similar to the existing self-driving taxi pilots (e.g. Waymo One) and ask when they do $X of revenue per year, or when $X of self-driving trucking is done per year. (I don’t know what AI freedom-of-the-road means, do you mean something significantly more ambitious than self-driving trucks or taxis?)
Man, the problem is that you say the “jump to newly accessible domains” will be the thing that lets you take over the world. So what’s up for dispute is the prototype being enough to take over the world rather than years of progress by a giant lab on top of the prototype. It doesn’t help if you say “I expect new things to sometimes become possible” if you don’t further say something about the impact of the very early versions of the product.
If e.g. people were spending $1B/year developing a technology, and then after a while it jumps from 0/year to $1B/year of profit, I’m not that surprised. (Note that machine translation is radically smaller than this, I don’t know the numbers.)
I do suspect they could have rolled out a crappy version earlier, perhaps by significantly changing their project. But why would they necessarily bother doing that? For me this isn’t violating any of the principles that make your stories sound so crazy. The crazy part is someone spending $1B and then generating $100B/year in revenue (much less $100M and then taking over the world).
(Note: it is surprising if an industry is spending $10T/year on R&D and then jumps from $1T --> $10T of revenue in one year in a world that isn’t yet growing crazily. The surprising depends a lot on the numbers involved, and in particular on how valuable it would have been to deploy a worse version earlier and how hard it is to raise money at different scales.)
Would you say that this is a good description of Suddenly Hominids but you don’t expect that to happen again, or that this is a bad description of hominids?
It’s not a description of hominids at all, no one spent any money on R&D.
I think there are analogies where this would be analogous to hominids (which I think are silly, as we discuss in the next part of this transcript). And there are analogies where this is a bad description of hominids (which I prefer).
Spending money on R&D is essentially the expenditure of resources in order to explore and optimize over a promising design space, right? That seems like a good description of what natural selection did in the case of hominids. I imagine this still sounds silly to you, but I’m not sure why. My guess is that you think natural selection isn’t relevantly similar because it didn’t deliberately plan to allocate resources as part of a long bet that it would pay off big.
I think natural selection has lots of similarities to R&D, but (i) there are lots of ways of drawing the analogy, (ii) some important features of R&D are missing in evolution, including some really important ones for fast takeoff arguments (like the existence of actors who think ahead).
If someones wants to spell out why they think evolution of hominids means takeoff is fast then I’m usually happy to explain why I disagree with their particular analogy. I think this happens in the next discord log between me and Eliezer.