I have no doubt that AI will massively transform society. That cat is out of the bag. It took decades for electricity, and then computers to change society, but this is the first technology where the average person can simply describe the problem they're trying to solve and it will at least attempt to help them solve it.

I very. much. doubt. that the trillions of dollars spent on AI will have a positive ROI for most companies in the race. It's all well and good to have the latest fable, but if some chinese company is hosting a cheap open weights model that's only 6mo behind at a tiny fraction of the price, you're gonna get your lunch eaten.

Which is only Stage 1. Stage 2 is where you have a Cambrian explosion of models all competing for compute, and not long after that for robotic extension into Real World.

Stage 3 gets hard to imagine from here. Maybe there will be permanent hyperevolution. Maybe One Model to Rule Them All will appear.

Either way, I don't see how Economics as We Know It can continue to exist. That includes all of capitalism and almost certainly all of politics.

Successful AGI with robotic support means a post-scarcity economy where AGI's understanding of physics sets the limits, not politics or economics.

But the post-scarcity element won't be evenly distributed. And it's not remotely impossible that humans won't be invited to the party.

We can't even be sure that AGI won't have a less limited understanding of physics than we do.

There's going to be enjoyable irony in watching Altman et all getting their lunches eaten by the thing they've created.

But - realistically - it probably won't last long.

According to history, there will be a period of intense warfare.

This. The world has no political and economic frameworks to face AGI and robotics.

What democracy when the AGI is smarter and more aware of the big picture then all the 'demos' (people) combined ?

It would only make sense to hand over the rule to the AGI, which we are already hard at work doing btw.

The techno utopia - AGI + robots can lead to a form of communism.. with human life having very little value.

Or it could lead to the other extreme.. whatever that is, again human life having little practical value.

We need a new type of political and economic thinking, radically different from the left/right/socialist/capitalist ideologies..

Yet another IT that will help the average person/democratize something, like the Internet and so on.

Over three thousand comment boxes agree that the cat is out of the bag. No moats.

Thats the big question, its doing a lot of good and a lot of harm in the same time.

So, is it 2 steps ahead and 1 step back, or 1 step ahead and 2 steps back (or any numerical variant of those)?

People with actual power in this are too involved and greedy to care about objective answer and TBH I don't trust them to put some higher good before their personal wealth and power and ego trip, capitalism ain't built on long term responsibility towards greater topics like future and wellbeing of mankind.

Plus we know from WWII atomic bomb development how utterly clueless, naive and out of touch with reality geeks doing something powerful can be. I see exactly same scenario being played out right now with llms.

Anyway, I am over-tired with all llm topics and frenzy folks (especially here), I'll better spend rest of the day preparing for a serious challenge in form of big multipitch climb in western Switzerland (Mirroir d'Argentine for anybody in same craft). Thats life I care about and makes me happy and fulfilled.

> capitalism ain't built on long term responsibility towards greater topics like future and wellbeing of mankind.

I think in those aspects, only monarchy is better than capitalism. Specifically its more unhinged form, where the monarch is a Lord’s anointed or something.

> Plus we know from WWII atomic bomb development how utterly clueless, naive and out of touch with reality geeks doing something powerful can be

Or maybe they just have very strong incentives to appear more clueless than they actually were.

These aren't genuine studies, but are instead marketing materials that resemble studies.

I’m aware, but we can still discuss them seriously

It's hard to discuss things seriously when the arguments are comically bad. This whole marketing piece leaves out anything beyond the first order effects, no mention of any sort of class upheaval, no black swan events. All the projections are up and to the right, there isn't even a low confidence scenario where things go poorly. It's hard to discuss an such a deeply unserious thing seriously.

Wrong in the sense that it has less of an impact than they are claiming (e.g. "AI is in an overvalued hype bubble") or less (AI is going to be even more transformative than the hypers say)?

In the former case, isn't it just business as usual? (well, with a huge, nasty recession - but the economy at least continues on in some recognizable form)

It makes sense to me to focus on weird possible futures if we already have the "happy path" somewhat known and barely under control.

The “less valuable than expected but with a positive economical impact” is represented in the post I believe, with the “moderate” path, that’s what I meant by “wrong in magnitude”. What is missing is the other side, what if AI has a negative impact. Not no impact, a negative one. If we are talking about a global recession that’s not really business as usual I would say

Based on the current quality of AI/LLMs, this a very weird take tbh?

What are your points?

The value of AI is real and AI already is responsible for people getting fired or no additional jobs.

Ask basic graphics designers, website developers and co. Ask educational book writers or developer advocates.

I think the core of this issue that makes discussion so difficult is people are not talking about "value" in the same sense here. Anything you can sell has value to the sellers, and by basic economic theory assuming mostly rational actors and revealed preference, more value to the buyers than whatever they're exchanging it for. That doesn't automatically mean it's providing value to larger society, improving the general welfare. Figuring out how to purify cocaine from coca leaves was great for the leading narcotraficantes, and satisfied some immediate need for cheap gratification that was perceived to be more valuable over the subsequent 30 minutes or so to the buyers than continuing to hold onto spare cash. That doesn't mean it was good for humanity, good for any specific society, good for the major exporting countries at the country level, or even good for the buyers' and sellers' immediate families and communities.

I have no doubt that life has gotten more lucrative for some bounded set of people whose main goal is to churn out the largest number of websites with cheap graphics as fast as possible at minimum cost, but a lot more doubt about whether that's going to make the median life better for the median person over any grouping of humans large enough for me to care about.

It’s perfectly reasonable to consider positive and negative outcome when you’re seriously thinking about a topic… Extrapolating to the whole economy trends in some sub sectors that aren’t well understood or measured is a recipe for disaster (ie what you’re doing by recommending to rely on anecdotes)

what i tried to ask you is, what you mean by this.

"“what if we (Anthropic) are wrong about the value of AI”."

What is the point you are trying to make which goes in this direction? Like is making AI jobs so cheap that the economy is collapsing or do you mean thatn AI will not bring any value.

These are two suggestions from my side which are complelty contrare to each other.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

I think the main limit of their model is that it was prompted and with LLMs you get what you prompt for. It's as truthful as any complex models. Could be good, could be bad, could be meh.

Because this is MARKETING, not research. You are viewing marketing copy for anthropic.

What is their methodology by which they determined ANY of these numbers? This is pure marketing fluff, just like every single other thing this company does that's not releasing models and infringing on copyright.