Andrej Karpathy: belief

Transcript context

…You think it’s continuous with this hyper-exponential trend? Yes. That’s why this was very interesting to me, because I was trying to find AI in the GDP for a while. I thought that GDP should go up. But then I looked at some of the other technologies that I thought were very transformative, like computers or mobile phones or et cetera. You can’t find them in GDP. GDP is the same exponential. Even the early iPhone didn’t have the App Store, and it didn’t have a lot of the bells and whistles that the modern iPhone has. So even though we think of 2008, when the iPhone came out, as this major seismic change, it’s actually not. Everything is so spread out and it so slowly diffuses that everything ends up being averaged up into the same exponential. It’s the exact same thing with computers. You can’t find them in the GDP like, “Oh, we have computers now.” That’s not what happened, because it’s such slow progression. With AI we’re going to see the exact same thing. It’s just more automation. It allows us to write different kinds of programs that we couldn’t write before, but AI is still fundamentally a program. It’s a new kind of computer and a new kind of computing system. But it has all these problems, it’s going to diffuse over time, and it’s still going to add up to the same exponential. We’re still going to have an exponential that’s going to get extremely vertical. It’s going to be very foreign to live in that kind of an environment. Are you saying that, if you look at the trend before the Industrial Revolution to now, you have a hyper-exponential where you go from 0% growth to then 10,000 years ago, 0.02% growth, and to now when we’re at 2% growth. That’s a hyper-exponential. Are you saying if you’re charting AI on there, then AI takes you to 20% growth or 200% growth? Or are you saying that if you look at the last 300 years, what you’ve been seeing is that you have technology after technology—computers, electrification, steam engines, railways, et cetera—but the rate of growth is the exact same, it’s 2%. Are you saying the rate of growth will go up?…

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