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?)
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?)