Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…What world do you see, Dwarkesh, where everything is not centralized? Because it seems to me that every force is screeching towards centralization. And that’s scary as hell. I would love for it not to be centralized completely. But maybe that’s the whole point of a machine that loves grace, right? It is everything and it makes our lives great. It’s so hard to think about the future. But I agree with you. I think the fundamental problem is that AI training has huge economies of scale, because any effort you spend on training an AI for a specific skill or a specific set of knowledge gets amortized across billions of sessions or billions of users. So that’s one effect. The other effect is that if you’re slightly ahead in the AI race and compute is in shortage, you can charge a much higher markup because you can better economize this scarce resource. So there are two effects which give more and more to the person who’s ahead in the AI race. There may be more. If models are learning from deployment, and one model is deployed much more widely than another one, it’s getting much more real-world data. Your point is taken that whether it’s user deployment and continual learning, whether it’s training and having these economies of scale, whether it’s the incremental progress where the best AI model helps you to make the next best AI model, RSI, all of these things point to centralization.…

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