>For other workers: wages may increase on paper, but not really for actual purchasing power.
This is not necessarily a conclusion you can draw from that statement. It's possible that as the economic pie grows, workers' purchasing power increases compared to the counterfactual (a non-AI world), but their purchasing power does not increase as much as the capital owners' does.
According to data in the site and paper [0] labor income is estimated $20T for all four scenarios (including no AI) in 2030. Which means capital takes ALL of the new pie coming from AI.
Also, I am not an economist but I assume if you are not growing as much as GDP, it basically means you’re shrinking. Relatively shrinking, but since everything is relative in an economy you are actually shrinking. Table 4 in paper gives the numbers.
Except, so far, this isn't actually what happens. I listened to Moody's "Inside Economics" podcast with Ramp's Chief Economist, and they observe that companies who adopt AI intensively actually hire 10% more people. Also, this article from The Economist suggests that evidence is mixed-to-positive for long term employment, while short term data center buildout is extremely positive for jobs. Paywalled unfortunately.
Because he works for Anthropic. Supposedly this project was not part of his official capacity as an employee of theirs.
However, if they had published first, it's hard to imagine Anthropic not taking the opportunity to claim "our employee solved this Millennium prize problem using our AI".
> [the Open AI rep] twice asserted that he wanted Levent removed from authorship, and said it would all be simple if only it were not the case that, and it was so annoying that, Levent works at Anthropic.
Later on the author claims that the OpenAI rep threatened to ruin his career if he didn't go along with them.
Worth noting that there were two versions of the problem:
- the proof in the equations with viscosity (which OpenAI claims to have solved), and
- the proof with no viscosity (which Tristian and Levent solved)
What is confusing is that if OpenAI can prove their independence from Levent and Tristian, they could take full credit for proving the viscous version of the problem. Offering to give one author credit for something they proved seems like a strange choice: if nothing else it seems obvious that it would drive a very deep wedge between the two authors of the non-viscous version.
It seems very hard for OpenAI to prove that independence. Since they seem unable to exclude the possibility that their model was trained on transcripts by the two mathematicians.
Even if true, I don't see why this is an issue. Are they not allowed to work on problems others are working on? Did Anthropic get first dibs on this problem? Competition is good. And I don't exactly have tons of sympathy when the other side is just a leading AI lab. It's not like it's some scholar who dedicated his life to this problem.
If we accept that it is a proof then it does improve human knowledge, even if no one can understand how to get there.
If you were navigating a pitch dark cave, wouldn't you find it useful to be able to see the light of the cave opening even if it's not bright enough to illuminate your path to it?
The big question is if there are larger economic gains to be made from ever greater intelligence. It seems to me like that may be the case for only a select few hard problems, while the vast majority of tasks approach their economic ceiling asymptotically with intelligence.
This is not necessarily a conclusion you can draw from that statement. It's possible that as the economic pie grows, workers' purchasing power increases compared to the counterfactual (a non-AI world), but their purchasing power does not increase as much as the capital owners' does.
reply