Sergey Levine: recommendation

Transcript context

…Separate from the question of whether people will get fired or not, a different question is, what will the economic impact be in five years? The reason I'm curious about this is because with LLMs, the relationship between the revenues for these models to their seeming capability has been sort of mysterious. You have something which feels like AGI. You can have a conversation where it really passes the Turing test. It really feels like it can do all this knowledge work. It's obviously doing a bunch of coding, et cetera. But the revenues from these AI companies are cumulatively on the order of $20-30 billion per year and that's much less than all knowledge work, which is $30-40 trillion. In five years are we in a similar situation to what LLMs are in now, or is it more like we have robots deployed everywhere and they're actually doing a whole bunch of real work, et cetera? It's a very subtle question. What it probably will come down to is this question of scope. The reason that LLMs aren't doing all software engineering is because they're good within a certain scope, but there's limits to that. Those limits are increasing, to be clear, every year. I think that there's no reason that we wouldn't see the same kind of thing with robots. The scope will have to start out small because there will be certain things that these systems can do very well and certain other things where more human oversight is really important. The scope will grow. What that will translate into is increased productivity. Some of that productivity will come from the robots themselves being valuable. Some of it will come from the people using the robots are now more productive in their work. But there's so many things which increase productivity. Like wearing gloves increases productivity or I don't know. You want to understand something which increases productivity a hundredfold versus something which has a small increase. Robots already increase productivity for workers. Where LLMs are right now in terms of the share of knowledge work they can do, is I guess like 1/1000th of the knowledge work that happens in the economy, at least in terms of revenue. Are you saying that fraction will be possible for robots, but for physical work, in five years?…

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