Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…Just about the ease of indexing, I think it’s definitely something to worry about a bit and keep an eye on. But as discussed in our own essay, and as other people have pointed out, it’s already not that hard to index. There’s been a bit of an increase in the privatization of returns, but still, well under 20% of the total market cap of non-tiny companies in the US is private. Everyone thinks about OpenAI and Anthropic. If that’s where all the wealth will accrue, then all these questions about whether open models will stay only a little bit behind, those are important. But even they look like they’re going public before too long, probably. The frictions that have been keeping companies from going public might themselves be alleviated by AI a lot, just all of the disclosure requirements and whatnot. They want to get access to more potential investors, too. If I had to guess, I would guess that the long general trend of lowering those frictions and making it easier for more and more people to index will continue, despite the recent bump in the other direction. This actually makes me hope even more so than before that the labs do get commoditized, or at the very least they go public as soon as possible. But hopefully they just get totally commoditized. I think AI will be much more popular and, more importantly, will be much more likely to lead to broad increases in prosperity if it is as hard to capture the gains of AI as it is to capture the gains of electrification. Exactly. There’s no anti-electricity people out there.…

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