Nat Friedman: belief

Transcript context

…What part of the AI narrative is wrong in the over-optimistic direction? Probably an over-optimistic case from both the people who are fearful of what will happen, and from people who are expecting great economic benefits is that we're definitely in this realm of diminishing returns from scale. For example GPT-4 is, my guess is, two orders of magnitude more expensive to train the GPT-3, but clearly not two orders of magnitude more capable. Now is it two orders of magnitude more economically valuable? That would also surprise me. When you're in these sigmoids, where you are going up this exponential and then you start to asymptote it, it can be difficult to tell if that's going to happen. The idea that we might not run into hard problems or that scaling will continue to be worth it on a dollar basis are reasons to be a little bit more pessimistic than the people who have high certainty of GDP increasing by 50% per month which I think some people are predicting. But on the whole, I'm very optimistic. You're asking me to like make the bear case for something I'm very bullish about. No, that's why I asked you to make the bear case because I know about you. I want to ask you about these foundation models. What is the stable equilibrium you think of how many of them will there be? Will it be an oligopoly like Uber and Lyft where…?…

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