Ezra Klein: belief

Transcript context

…Oh, sure, but I’m struck by how small many companies can become. Midjourney, which you’re familiar with, at the peak of its innovation was eight people. That was not mainly a story about consultants. Sam Altman says it will be possible to have billion-dollar companies run by one person. I suspect that’s two or three people, but nonetheless, that seems not so far off. It seems to me, there really ought to be significant parts of the government — by no means all — where you could have a much smaller number of people directing the AIs. It would be the same people at the top giving the orders as today, more or less, and just a lot fewer staff. I don’t see how that can’t be the case. I agree with you that, in theory, should be the case, but I do think that, as you actually see it emerge from “in theory should be the case” till we figure out a way to do it, it’s going to turn out that things the federal government does are not all that like [putting] an image prompt into a thing. It is so hard to get rid of people. Don’t you need to start with the chainsaws? Maybe the next Democratic administration rehires what’s needed over —…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.