I really enjoyed this, and especially appreciated the detailed assumptions and corresponding projections in the research tab.
Your treatment on energy requirements is interesting, but unless I’m missing something I haven’t seen anything explicit on this—is your assumption that energy requirements won’t be a bottleneck that slows down the US competitive advantage?
I read your chart (figure 23) to suggest that compute will require 3.5% of US energy and assuming no increase in US energy production ( 7x increase from Jan 2025 baseline).
Are you concerned at all about energy production capacity limiting the US ability to deploy these models at scale and fully ramp up the SEZs? I think that would either require a significant decline in broader power consumption for other purposes, a significant increase in efficiency, or broad deployment of new energy sources quickly (which has not been achievable quickly in the US).
NULevel
Karma: 3
Completely agree with this. While there are some novel applications possible with reasoning models, the main value has been the ability to trace specific chains of thought and redefine/reprompt accordingly. Makes the system (slightly) less of a black box
I think the the assumption is that this is the USG of the last 50 years—which has flaws, but also has human rights goals and an ability to eventually change and accommodate the public’s beliefs.
So in the scenario where AI is controlled by a strongly democratic USG, you have a much more robust “alignment” to enlightenment values and no one person with too much power.
That said, that’s probably a flawed assumption for how the US government operates now/ over the next decade.