AI may preserve the long-run 2% growth trend

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:22:20

   So we were talking about how currently it feels like when you're doing AI engineering or AI research, these models are more, like, in the category of compiler rather than in the category of a replacement. At some point, if you have, quote-unquote, AGI, it should be able to do what you do. And do you feel like having a million copies of you in parallel results in some huge speed up of AI progress? Basically, if that does happen, do you expect to see an intelligence explosion?

2. 1:22:46

   Or even once we have a true H&M, not talking about LLMs today, but real H&M. I guess what I mean is I do, but it's business as usual because we're in an intelligence explosion already and have been for decades. And when you look at GDP, it's basically the GDP curve that is an exponential weighted sum over so many aspects of the industry. Everything is gradually being automated, has been for hundreds of years.

3. 1:23:08

   Industrial revolution is automation and some of the physical components and the tool building and all this kind of stuff. Compilers are early software automation, et cetera. So I kind of feel like we've been recursively self-improving and exploding for a long time. Maybe another way to see it is, I mean, Earth was a pretty, I mean, if you don't look at the biomechanics and so on, it was a pretty boring place, I think, and looked very similar if you just look from space and Earth is spinning.

4. 1:23:31

   And then like we're in the middle of this like firecracker event, but we're seeing it in slow motion. But I definitely feel like this has already happened for a very long time. And again, like I don't see AI as like a distinct technology with respect to what has already been happening for a long time. So you think it's going to continue sort of this hyper-exponential trend? And that's why, like this was very interesting to me because I was trying to find AI in the GDP for a while.

5. 1:23:57

   I thought the GDP should go up. But then I looked at some of the other technologies that I thought were very transformative. like maybe computers or mobile phones or et cetera, you can't find them in GDP. GDP is the same exponential. And it's just that even, for example, 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. And so even though we think of 2008, was it, when iPhone came out as like some major seismic change, it's actually not.

6. 1:24:21

   Everything is like so spread out and so slowly diffuses that everything ends up being averaged up into the same exponential. And it's the exact same thing with computers. You can't find them in the GDP as like, oh, we have computers now. That's not what happened because it's such a slow progression. and 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 and 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. And we're still going to get an exponential that's going to get extremely vertical. And it's going to be very foreign to

7. 1:24:56

   live in that kind of an environment. Are you saying that like, what will happen is, so if you go, if you look at the trend before the industrial revolution to currently, you have a hyper exponential where you go from like 0% growth to then 10,000 years ago, 0.02% growth. And then currently we're at 2% growth. So that's the hyper exponential. And you're saying, if you're charting AI on there, then it's like AI takes you to 20% growth or 200% growth. Or you could be saying, if you look at the last 300 years, what you've been seeing is you have technology after technology, computers, electrification, steam, steam engines, railways, et cetera. But the rate of growth is the exact same. It's 2%. So are you saying the rate of growth will? No, I expect the rate of growth has also stayed roughly constant, right? For only the last 200, 300 years. But over the

8. 1:25:41

   course of human history it's like exploded right it's like gone from like zero percent basically to like faster faster faster industrial explosion yeah two percent like basically i guess what i'm saying is for a while i tried to find ai or look for ai in like the gdp curve and i kind of convinced myself that this is false and that even when people talk about recursive self-improvement and labs and stuff like that i even don't this is business as usual of course it's going to recursively self-improve and it's been recursively self-improving like llms allow the engineers to work much more efficiently to build the next round of LLM. And a lot more of the components are being automated and tuned, etc. So all the engineers having access to Google Search is sort of part of it. All the engineers having an ID, all of them having

9. 1:26:20

   autocomplete or having cloth code, etc. It's all just part of the same speed up of the whole thing. So it's just so smooth. But just to clarify, you're saying that the rate of growth will not change. Like, you know, the intelligence explosion will show up as like, It just enabled us to continue staying on the 2% growth trajectory just as the internet helped us stay on the 2% growth trajectory. Yeah, my expectation is that it stays the same pattern.

10. 1:26:45

    Yeah. I mean, just to throw the opposite argument against you, my expectation is that it, like, blows up