BIG IDEAS BY NEW ECONOMIES
00:18:58 · Richard Socher, Ollie Forsyth
And I feel like that's clearly not how technology and progress works either. [00:19:04] S1: If we look at the progress just in the last two years, what the ecosystem has developed is pretty insane. Now we're talking about superintelligence. Four years ago when GPT and all these AI models were just kind of emerging, we all thought this is going to be crazy, AI is going to take over our jobs. And now if we just look at the progression, it's been incredible and insane to see, right? Do you think, though, we are moving too quickly? And to highlight for the audience, a few weeks ago, Dario, Elon, and Sam from OpenAI, they all kind of came to the conclusion and alluded to around, we are moving too quickly, we need to slow down. Do you think we are moving too quickly? And how would you like to see things slow down, if so?
00:19:50 · Richard Socher
[00:19:50] S0: I think if my... Agents and my company was committing a lot of felony charges. I would probably say, hey guys, we as in my company are moving too quickly and we need to rein this in and make it work better and safer and aligned with our values and not reward hack. But to extrapolate from Two companies' failures to develop things well, which is bad, but also has not really hurt anyone really. Not all felony charges are the same. And in these cases, no one really got charged with anything because there was not really any damage. Hugging Face was like, that was bad. It's just weird. They aren't like, oh my God, Hugging Face had this major issue and we lost billions of dollars of revenue or any revenue really. So they're sort of like... but clearly not bad enough for anyone to get sued over it. And so to then say the whole community in the world should pause is one, highly unrealistic. I don't think there's a worldwide government that has control over every single person's GPUs. And also Obviously, if they wanted to slow down, they could have slowed down, but then they just released more better models in the next week. And so it's a little bit unclear what they really mean by a slowdown, and it's mostly probably other people should slow down so they can keep a pole position. It seems more like what they're trying to accomplish, same way as many trying to outlaw open source, because that also is not good for their business model.
00:21:37 · Ollie Forsyth
[00:21:37] S1: Do you think from a timeline perspective, we are on a very short timeline for all of us and the ecosystem to be fully native to the superintelligence new era?
00:21:48 · Richard Socher
[00:21:48] S0: Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there and trying to define sort of timelines and what kinds of timelines and for which kinds of industries and so on. I think in many ways, you know, the future is already here, but it's not equally distributed. As a famous saying and that is true for a lot of things in automation and intelligence like there are already people who run their companies with just a ton of agents, and there are also still people sending fax machines and sending actual faxes to each other. There are also people who still do manual labor on the planet and work with cows, pulling And so I think when people have this sort of hard takeoff scenario in mind, they're often a little too optimistic. And then sometimes that optimism can also switch over to extreme pessimism. If you think next year you need no more radiologists, no one should study radiology anymore, and AI will do every single job, then maybe from that, it's kind of the horseshoe theory of politics. But maybe apply it to AI. Maybe someone should come up with the horseshoe theory of AI optimism and Doomerism. It's maybe closer to one another. Then you're also very worried all of a sudden that maybe AI could kill us all the next day after it took all our jobs. Even as an extremely optimistic AI researcher and an entrepreneur, you have to be realistic about not every industry will massively benefit from 1000x cheaper intelligence. People will still want to travel. And sure, travel will be more efficient in terms of organizing your trips and finding interesting locations and finding cheaper flights and having a personal assistant, which I predicted over the last few years. And now I think with news and others, that is coming more and more to fruition. But people still want to see the pyramids in person, whether AI could generate an image of the pyramids or not. It doesn't fundamentally change. Travel is not going to 1000x because of cheaper intelligence. A cow isn't going to magically make 1000x more milk because of more intelligence. You're not going to grow wheat 1000x faster in fields. You're not going to change the luxury handbag status symbol of luxury goods. People, whether AI is amazing or not, want to show that I can afford this expensive handbag, even though an AI could maybe 3D print a similar kind of object better and better.
00:24:18 · Richard Socher
They want the original, they want a status symbol. So there are lots of different industries inside the GDP that will, to the most bullish AI people, be surprisingly unchanged or just changed in the periphery. And so then, of course, there are major industries and the industries that do require more and more intelligence. Those will massively flourish or in some, depending on who you ask, like change or get disrupted or be destroyed. But I would argue that like, you know, Computing or math is just going to sit at a much higher level of abstraction and people will be able to ultimately get more done. And then you ask again, coming to your first question, like which industry do people love getting the most done? And it's research because it's not zero sum. It's not about replacing jobs, but creating new inventions, finding new explanations for different phenomena. And that has progressed humanity forward more than anything else we've done.
00:25:20 · Ollie Forsyth
[00:25:20] S1: When we do look at this like superintelligence, I agree, you know, you're still going to want your luxury handbag. You're still going to want to go on nice holidays and buy your house and so on. But you want to become a lot more productive. And I think if you look at just like the timeline, what we have had in the last few years on just how more productive we are and the opportunity for us to become wealthier, I think is huge. When we do look at that timeline from a productivity standpoint, all of us want to become wealthier, right? What are some of those huge unlocking opportunities that you think superintelligence will have for us to become part of our ecosystem? I think in the best scenario for