Nathan Lambert: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I think the real question, and this relates to the remote worker thing, is when are we going to see a big, obvious leap in economic impact? Because currently there’s not been an obvious leap in economic impact from LLM models, for example. Aside from AGI or ASI, there’s a real question of when we are going to see a GDP jump. Jump. Yeah, it’s like, what is the GDP made up of? A lot of it is financial services, so I don’t know what this is. It’s just hard for me to think about the GDP bump, but I would say that software development becomes valuable in a different way when you no longer have to look at the code anymore. So when it is like, Claude will make you a small business—which is essentially Claude can set up your website, your bank account, your email, and your whatever else—and you just have to express what you’re trying to put into the world. That’s not just an enterprise market, but it is hard. I don’t know how you get people to try doing that. I guess if ChatGPT can do it—people are trying ChatGPT. I think it boils down to the scientific question of, “How hard is tool use to solve?” Because a lot of the stuff you’re implying, the remote work stuff, is tool use. It’s like computer use; how you have an LLM that goes out there, this agentic system, and does something in the world, and only screws up 1% of the time.…

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