Alex Imas: belief

Transcript context

…This goes to show you that every question is connected to every other. That question about whether there’s runaway gains connects to questions about recursive self-improvement. Even if not recursive self-improvement, then continual learning, or online learning, which lets a model learn on the job. So if it’s deployed, it gets to learn more. These are just forecasting technical questions which then impact whether Uganda will have any purchase on the returns of AGI. The reason I’m emphasizing the question is I think both for the messy middle and for developing countries, a recommendation that is often made naively is that you’ve got to do some kind of retraining. You’ve got to do some kind of jobs program, or you’ve got to have them build data centers in your country. I think you guys are suggesting something closer to just buying the index of AGI. That’s probably a much cleaner strategy and much more likely to succeed. These are the two scenarios. I think there is a world where it is concentrated, in which case it’s going to be really hard to index AGI. There is another world where it is electricity. Basically every company has access to AGI. So you just buy the index. Nigeria just needs to buy the index, and Nigeria has access to AGI because of the open models. Just to get back to the question about whether to go with retraining or trying to index. I would prioritize trying to index, just given how fast AI could hit the world. But I definitely wouldn’t just rely on that. In the messy middle cases or the long-timeline cases where we don’t get anything like AGI all that soon, it would be leaving a lot of value on the table if you could have retrained to be a bit better educated on how to use the latest wave of computing. I don’t think there’s that much of an either/or there.…

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