This is a fun peek into the economic implications of RSI/ASI. Because it's so infinitely valuable that it basically destroys all markets, labs will eventually do stuff like stop releasing models completely and skipping out on contracted commitments because they'll have the power to just drive their competitors out of business before the legal battle gets expensive.
Cloud providers - at first smaller ones, then the hyperscalers - will follow suit, completely closing sales to anyone but the labs and demanding payment in equity/direct decision-making power rather than cash. There's no particular reason why the inference/training split has to be 80/20, and no amount of willingness to pay can help you in an event that turns your money worthless.
I don't think this scenario makes sense. It's one of a class of scenarios I've seen several of, that simultaneously assume:
A) ASI is developed and massively overshadows the rest of the world economy
B) the world still has rule of law, contracts, business, well-developed finance, etc
You can get to a lot of weird conclusions if you assume both A and B, but I think the much more likely scenario is that if A happens, B stops being true in short order. If you are a company and you have ASI, you just stop caring about business and money and economics, and your outcomes instead start looking like "you conquer the world" or "you upload the board of directors to a fleet of von Neumann probes" or "you messed up, everyone dies".
There will be a brief(or, depending on the underlying rules of reality ASI uncovers, not-so-brief) period where A and B do overlap - we have superintelligence but still have to run experiments, manufacture robots, test new drugs in vivo, etc. That period is in and of itself dangerous for the labs, because many entities can just stop them by denying necessary inputs. For the labs to conquer the world, they'll need cooperation - from the state, from robotics companies, from compute companies, from the mining and energy and agriculture sectors.
There will be a period of time where markets attempt to run in a business-as-usual way while the transactions that matter happen as power-sharing arrangements - spots on the "AI Governance Board" or the "uploaded to von neumann probe" club. Markets will still matter in that the labs will need the state to overturn market obstacles to control of the world.
The existence of the A-B overlap also suggests to me that the US-China gap is less dire for China than it appears - they may be able to use their superior industrial, robotics, and scientific base to win the second leg of the race despite losing the first.
The combination of A and B is cyberpunk at its core, it takes off in the form of corporate consolidation and then control of the government. Large corporations will still have the rule of law between each other because they'll have both money and hard power. The average individual that wants to rise up against said corps will quickly be identified by ubiquitous surveillance and imprisoned/slave labor camped.
I don't think one Claude can replace ten engineers of the caliber it takes to build a billion dollar company.
I also don't think that every set of ten engineers of that level builds a billion dollar company every time.
There is also a limit to the number of billion dollar companies that can be built before being a "billion dollar company" no longer means much (see: Zimbabwe).
Not really. It's possible they could, but in practice they cannot. Creating a billion dollar company requires a good idea, good timing, and a lot of luck, the engineers are the least important part.
More than that it takes things like the right social connections, strong marketing, insight into customer demand, infrastructure spend, etc. You can't normally just convert engineering effort into profit in the way implied.
10 engineers build a billion dollar company and immediately realise they need 1000 people to run it. Getting 1000 Claude licenses will still be expensive, let alone maintaining those swarms of agents.
this wont be possible by the time its possible. there would be massive deflation. why would i care about 10 engineeers prompts when i can prompt it myself
There's literally no indication that this is the case, or will ever be. Unless you're a completely naive person who's impressed with all output of an LLM because you don't know what you're talking about. These models aren't impressive, and the people who think they are impressive are even less impressive.
A market with only a single good makes that good infinitely valuable for exchange purposes. No trade can happen - everyone is just sitting on a big pile of the only thing that matters and they can only trade it for less of the only thing that matters.
Especially when you can actively choose to not use Anthropic. They think they have a moat from all of the IP they've stolen. Just wait until there's nothing more to steal and the laws eventually turn against them. And let's be honest about these companies. It is very much Dario and Sam and Sundar and Mark and Peter and Elon and... These are the choices they are making and hopefully they are held accountable both legally and within society as a whole.
No, you pretty obviously didn't understand it, at least in the sense of ASI being talked about. The whole "oh don't buy it" stops mattering. Humans are no longer the sole creators of information and intelligence. That is AI no longer has to steal, but humans will have to beg, borrow, or steal the information/products that ASI creates.
I didn't say "buy" anything. You've clearly bought into the narrative that ASI is even remotely possible with current architectures. You've chosen to ignore all of the lies that have thus far failed to come to fruition. The assumption is an insane leap from models in a loop that have no intelligence to models taking over the "sole creators of information and intelligence". Anthropic marketing is doing a phenomenal job for a large portion of those in the bubble.
Cloud providers - at first smaller ones, then the hyperscalers - will follow suit, completely closing sales to anyone but the labs and demanding payment in equity/direct decision-making power rather than cash. There's no particular reason why the inference/training split has to be 80/20, and no amount of willingness to pay can help you in an event that turns your money worthless.