Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Because I feel like I don't... What am I not understanding? I hear the word "diffusion," I hear the word "bottlenecks," but I just don't have anything concrete in my head when I hear that. What are people who are thinking about AI missing here when they just plug these things into their models? I'm not sure I'm the one to diagnose, but I would say when I'm in the Bay Area, the people here to me are the smartest people I've ever met, on average. They're the most ambitious, dynamic, and smartest, by a clear grand slam compared to New York City or London or anywhere. That's awesome, and I love it. But I think a side result of that is that people here overvalue intelligence. Their models of the world are built on intelligence mattering much, much more than it really does. Now, people in Washington don't have that problem. We have another problem, and that needs to be corrected, too. But I just think if you could root that out of your minds, it would be pretty easy to glide into this expert consensus view that tech diffusion is universally pretty slow. And that's not going to change. No one's built a real model to show why it should change, other than sort of hyperventilating blog posts about everything's going to change right away. The model is that you can have AIs make more AIs, right? That you can have returns.…

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