Andrej Karpathy: belief

Transcript context

…It often ends up being misleading in these conversations. I don’t like to use the word intelligence in this context because intelligence implies you think there’ll be a single superintelligence sitting in a server and it’ll divine how to come up with new technologies and inventions that cause this explosion. That’s not what I’m imagining when I’m imagining 20% growth. I’m imagining that there are billions of very smart human-like minds, potentially, or that’s all that’s required. But the fact that there’s hundreds of millions of them, billions of them, each individually making new products, figuring out how to integrate themselves into the economy. If a highly experienced smart immigrant came to the country, you wouldn’t need to figure out how we integrate them in the economy. They figure it out. They could start a company, they could make inventions, or increase productivity in the world. We have examples, even in the current regime, of places that have had 10-20% economic growth. If you just have a lot of people and less capital in comparison to the people, you can have Hong Kong or Shenzhen or whatever with decades of 10% plus growth. There’s a lot of really smart people who are ready to make use of the resources and do this period of catch-up because we’ve had this discontinuity, and I think AI might be similar. I understand, but I still think that you’re presupposing some discrete jump. There’s some unlock that we’re waiting to claim. And suddenly we’re going to have geniuses in data centers. I still think you’re presupposing some discrete jump that has no historical precedent that I can’t find in any of the statistics and that I think probably won’t happen. I mean, the Industrial Revolution is such a jump. You went from 0.2% growth to 2% growth. I’m just saying you’ll see another jump like that.…

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