Scott Alexander: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, but I would assume the conversion speed is also... Maybe to give one hypothetical here right now, let’s just say biomedicine as an example of one of the fields you’d want to accelerate, and whenever these CEOs get on podcasts, they’re often talking about curing cancer and so forth. And it seems like a big thing these frontier biomedical research facilities are excited about is the virtual cell. Now, the virtual cell, it takes a tremendous amount of compute, I assume, to train these DNA foundation models and to do all the other computation necessary to simulate a virtual cell. If it is the case that the cure for Alzheimer’s and cancer and so forth is bottlenecked by the virtual cell, it’s not clear if you had a million superintelligences in the 60s and you asked them cure cancer for me, they would just have to solve making GPUs at scale, which would require solving all kinds of interesting physics and chemistry problems, material science problems, building process, building fabs for computing, and then going through 40 years of making more and more efficient fabs that can do all of Moore’s Law from scratch. And that’s just one technology. And it just seems like you just need this broad scale. The entire economy needs to be upgraded for you to cure cancer in the 60s just because you need the GPUs to do the virtual cell, assuming that’s the bottleneck. First of all, I agree if there’s only one way to do something that makes it much harder, and maybe that one way takes very long, we’re assuming that there may be more than one way to cure cancer, more than one way to do all of these things, and they’ll be working on finding the one that is least bottlenecked. Part of the reason- I realize I spent too long talking about that robot example, but we do think that they’re going to be getting a lot of physical world things done very quickly once you have a million robots a month, you can actually do a lot of physical world experiments. We look at examples of people trying to get entire economies off the ground very quickly. So for example, China post-Deng, I don’t know. Would you have predicted that 20, 30 years after being kind of a communist basket case, they can actually be doing this really cutting edge bio research? I realize that’s a much weaker thing than we’re positing, but it was done just with the human brain with a lot fewer resources than we’re talking about. Same issue with, let’s say Elon Musk and SpaceX. I think in the year 2000 we would not have thought that somebody could move two times, five times faster than NASA with pretty limited resources. They were able to get like I think a lot more years of technological advance in than we would have expected. Partly that’s because just Elon is crazy and never sleeps. Like if you look at the examples of things from SpaceX, he is breathing down every worker’s neck being like, what’s this part? How fast is this part going? Can we do this part faster? And the limiting factor is basically hours in Elon’s day in the sense that he cannot be doing that with everybody’s. Super intelligence is not even that smart. It just yells at every single worker.…

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