Ryan Kidd: commitment

Transcript context

…Yeah. Quick. This might be a bit of a digression, but quick follow up on when you said companies are primarily doing this to make money. I actually would model them fairly differently than that. Take OpenAI, for example. Sam Altman has said, you know, we could burn $5 billion, $50 billion, $500 billion. I don't care. And we're making AGI. It's going to be expensive. I think that's almost a direct quote. And then when you look at their mission, I'm always struck by how the even just the way that they've chosen to define AGI to me strikes me as kind of inherently ideological. Like you could set your goal in any way, shape or form you might want to, and theirs is like explicitly in this frame of outcompeting human workers. And I think that they are sincere in their expectation that it's going to be good for everyone and it's going to free people from drudgery. And like, I certainly hope they're right about that. I'd love to live in a world where people don't have to do work they don't enjoy doing, but I don't know. I kind of I think of them more as like Obviously they're quite different too across the different companies, but I think of it less as like trying to get rich and more like trying to make a real mark on history is kind of the biggest summary that I would give for a lot of them. Does that resonate with you or not really? Maybe. I don't want to I can't really speculate on the psychologies of the leaders of these labs, let alone their share, like not shareholders so much as I guess like venture capitalist investors and everyone else they've made promises to, their clients and so on, their employees. I can't really speculate about that. I will say that given that the value of AGI is estimated as at least between 1 and 17 quadrillion dollars, I think that's a lot of money. It's a pretty big mark on history. I'm not sure if it even matters whether they're trying to make a big mark on history or make money. We can adopt Dennett's intentional stance about the AI companies. Be like, Okay, so what does it look like they're doing? If we were to conceptualize them as a coherent agent trying to do a thing, what is the thing that they would be trying to be doing? To me, it seems a lot like they're trying to make a bunch of money. But making your mark in history could also be valid. Though I would say, I guess in the world where I expect, I don't want to use any specific AI lab as an example, but I think in the world where an AI lab is trying very specifically to make their mark in history and not trying to make a bunch of money, I'd expect It might look identical, actually, to this world right now. Yeah, given the capital requirements, I mean, that is, it seems like Anthropic has sort of said as much, right? Like in their early days, they were less focused on commercialization or even, you know, sort of thought they might try to stay not commercial somehow or less commercial. And now it's just like, well, you can't really do that if you want to compete in this particular game because Certainly, as long as you believe scaling laws continue to rule everything around us, then you kind of just have to show that you can bring in resources to attract resources. And that is the path to making a mark on history. Again, Ilya maybe stands out as somebody doing something quite different there.…

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