Daron Acemoglu: belief

Transcript context

…Okay. Anthropic is a trillion-dollar company. The rate of increase of its revenue is through the ceiling. Models seem to be getting better at an accelerating pace. Do you wish to revise your estimates? Yes. If I were writing that today, I would revise my estimates, but the general point remains. There are three general points there. One is a meta point, which is that there is a particular way we should think about the contribution of artificial intelligence to productivity. It’s going to come through doing new things, and it’s going to come through cost savings in the things that we already do. That’s the meta point. The second was trying to put some flesh on those bones and say, given the numbers that others have come up with for what tasks, what occupations are going to be impacted by AI? Can we try to do that? Then the third was just a rhetorical point, which is the industry just comes up with some crazy estimates, so can we try to ground them a little bit? Those are the three things. The first and the third, I would write them exactly the same way today. The second, which is the numbers, of course, would be different. Relative to what I thought in 2023, 2024, when that paper was written and completed, yes, the models have advanced faster. On the other hand, relative to what I was expecting there, the applications on the basis of the models, which are crucial for the spread of the models, widespread adoption of the models, have been developing pretty sluggishly. The future is very unknown, very uncertain, much more than usual, and I try to emphasize that in the paper, and agentic AI is creating much more uncertainty in that. It is possible that agentic AI will also facilitate those applications, and in the course of two years or three years, we’re going to have many applications that small and medium-sized enterprises can take off the shelf and use. That would be a game-changer. My expectation is that it’s still going to be somewhat slow. Yes, I think I would revise that up a little bit, but not radically. If we look at, say, 1995 to 1998, we have an IT boom. It looks quite unsexy by current standards, but productivity growth goes up by at least half a percentage point. I would be shocked if what we have now didn’t do at least as much for us. I completely reject the crazy utopian or dystopian estimates, but would you be willing to say that half a percentage point of productivity growth is certainly something easily imaginable and maybe to be expected? Or is that still too high for you?…

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