Dylan Patel: belief

Transcript context

…One thing I find crazy about these scenarios is just how much of the world’s future labor supply ends up in very few companies, and also how fast that labor supply grows year over year. If compute at the frontier in FLOP terms is growing 4-5x a year — and further the compute required to achieve a level of capabilities is decreasing 3x a year — basically the effective AI population size at the frontier labs is increasing 10x year over year. That doesn’t really matter that much right now, because AIs are not good enough to do full jobs or be as autonomous as people in their capacity to do work or pull off schemes or whatever. But if the current trend continues, you have a world where OpenAI goes from having, say, basically 10 million AI laborers this year to 100 million the next year, to a billion the year after that. Pretty soon, even if compute scaling slows down, it doesn’t take many more years before each company individually has more labor equivalence than there are people on Earth. I think that’s very plausible by the end of this decade, that there’s more AI labor, more effective population, within a single lab than there are people on Earth. We talk often about centralization of power because of nationalization or whatever. But we don’t think enough about the fact that we’re actually moving very fast into a regime where most “people”, in terms of work output, are concentrated within two labs who are consuming more and more of the world’s compute. If these AIs are misaligned, then most of the world is misaligned, basically, because most of the world’s minds are there. But even if they’re not, very few companies have a lot of influence or a lot of control. There was the whole spat recently where I think Gavin Baker was like, “Dario believes that there’s only going to be one company in the world. ” Then Sholto and Dario came out and were like, “No, no, no. We didn’t say that.” But ultimately, if you believe in RSI, if you believe the labs are the most effective user of compute and can generate the most value from the compute, then the only thing that’s going to happen is centralization of compute. If you believe in AI researchers, RSI, AGI, then all of this exists, all of this is the base. This is even true if there’s no RSI. The effective population of the frontier is currently increasing 10x year over year for a given level of capabilities. So if you get to the level of capabilities of a very competent remote worker or a very competent software engineer or a very competent researcher, the population of those is increasing 10x year over year at the current rate of capabilities growth.…

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