Sergey Levine: uncertainty

Transcript context

…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? That's a very hard question to answer. I'm probably not prepared to tell you what percentage of all labor work can be done by robots, because I don't think right now, off the cuff, I have a sufficient understanding of what's involved in that big of a cross-section of all physical labor. What I can tell you is this. It's much easier to get effective systems rolled out gradually in a human-in-the-loop setup. Again, this is exactly what we've seen with coding systems. I think we'll see the same thing with automation, where basically robot plus human is much better than just human or just robot. That just makes total sense. It also makes it much easier to get all the technology bootstrapped. Because when it's robot plus human now, there's a lot more potential for the robot to actually learn on the job, acquire new skills. Because a human can label what's happening?…

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