The Intelligence Age

The entire AI trend - long term is based on the idea that AI will profoundly change the world. This has sparked a global race for developing better AI systems and the more dangerous winner takes all outcome. It is therefore not surprising that billions of dollars are being spent to develop more powerful AI systems as well as to restructure operations around them.

All the existing systems we have must fundamentally change for the better if we want a good future.

The positive aspects / utopia promises have much more visibility to the public than the negative effects / dystopian world.

ARE WE TO pretend that Human greed, selfishness, desires to dominate and control, animalistic behaviour, use of technologies for war and other destructive purposes don't exist?

We are living in times of war and chaos and uncertainty. Increasingly advanced technology is being used on the battlefield in more covert and strategic ways.

History is repeating itself again in many ways. Have we failed to learn? The consequences might be harsher with more advanced technology.

I have read and thought deeply about several anti AI doomer takes from prominent researchers and scientists but I haven't seen any which aren't based on assumptions or foolproof. For something that profoundly changes the world, it's bad to base your hopes on assumptions.

I see people dunking on llms which might not be AI's final form. Then they extrapolate that and say there is nothing to worry about. It is a matter of when not if.

The thought of being useless or worse being treated as nothing more than pests is worrying. Job losses are minor in comparison.

The only hope I have is that we are all in this together. I hope peace and goodwill prevails. I hope necessary actions are taken before it's too late.

A more pragmatic perspective indicates that there are more pressing problems that need to be addressed if we want to avoid a doomer scenario.

My take:

* Foom/doom isn't helpful. But, calm cautiousness is. If you're acting from a place of fear and emotional dysregulation, you'll make ineffective choices. If you get calm and regulated first, and then take actions, they'll be more effective. (This is my issue with AGI-risk people, they often seem triggered/fear/alarm-driven rather than calm but cautious)

* Piece is kind of a manifesto for raising money for AI infra

* Sam's done a podcast before about meditation where he talked about similar themes of "prudence without fear" and the dangers of "deep fear and panic and anxiety" and instead the importance of staying "calm and centered during hard and stressful moments" - responding, not reacting (strong +1)

* It's no accident that o1 is very good at math physics and programming. It'll keep getting much better here. Presumably this is the path for AGI to lead to abundance and cheaper energy by "solving physics"

While it's true there are a lot of jobs obsoleted by technological progress, the vision of personal AI teams creating a new age of prosperity only makes sense for knowledge workers. Sure, a field worker picking cabbage could also have an AI team to coordinate medical care. But in this brilliant future, are the lowest members of society suddenly well-paid?

The steam engine and subsequent Industrial Revolution created a lot of jobs and economic productivity, sure, but a huge amount of those jobs were dirty, dangerous factory jobs, and the lion's share of the productivity was ultimately captured by robber barons for quite some time. The increase in standard of living could only be seen in aggregate on pages of statistics from the mahogany-paneled offices of Standard Oil, while the lives of the individuals beneath those papers more often resembled Sinclair's Jungle.

Altman's suggestion that avoiding AI capture by the rich merely requires more compute is laughable. We have enormous amounts of compute currently, and its productivity is already captured by a small number of people compared to the vast throngs that power civilization in total. Why would AI make this any different? The average person does not understand how AI works and does not have the resources to utilize it. Any further advancements in AI, including "personalized AI teams," will not be equally shared, they will be packaged into subscription services and sold, only to enrich those who already control the vast majority of the world's wealth.

> As one example, we expect that this technology can cause a significant change in labor markets (good and bad) in the coming years, but most jobs will change more slowly than most people think, and I have no fear that we’ll run out of things to do (even if they don’t look like “real jobs” to us today). People have an innate desire to create and to be useful to each other, and AI will allow us to amplify our own abilities like never before. As a society, we will be back in an expanding world, and we can again focus on playing positive-sum games.

It's very easy as an extremely rich person to just say, "don't worry, in the end it'll be better for all of us." Maybe that's true on a societal scale, but these are people's entire worlds being destroyed.

Imagine you went to college for a medical specialty for 8-10 years, you come out as an expert, and 2 years later that entire field is handled by AI and salaries start to tank. Imagine you have been a graphic designer for 20 years supporting your 3 children and bam a diffusion model can do your job for a fraction of the cost. Imagine you've been a stenographer working in courtrooms to support your ill parents and suddenly ASR can do your job better than you can. This is just simple stuff we can connect the dots on now. There will be orders of magnitude more shifts that we can't even imagine right now.

To someone like Sam, everything will be fine. He can handle the massive societal shift because he has options. Every a moderately wealthy person will be OK.

But the entire middle class is going to start really freaking the fuck out soon as more and more jobs disappear. You're already seeing anti-AI sentiment all over the web. Even in expert circles, you can see skepticism. People saying things like, "how do I opt out of Apple Intelligence?" People don't WANT more grammar correction or AI emojis in their lives, they just want to survive and thrive and own a house.

How are we going to handle this? Sam's words of "if we could fast-forward a hundred years from today, the prosperity all around us would feel just as unimaginable" doesn't mean shit to a family of 4 who went through layoffs in the year 2025 because AI took their job while Microsoft's stock grows 50%.

I'm not an AI skeptic at all, I use llms all the time, and find them very useful. But stuff like this makes me very skeptical of the people who are making and selling AI.

It seems like there was a really sweet spot wrt the capabilities AI was able to "unlock" with scale over the last couple years, but my high level sense is that each meaningful jumps of baseline raw "intelligence" required an exponential increases in scale, in terms of training data and computation, and we've reached the ceiling of "easily available" increases, it's not as easy to pour "as much as it takes" into GPT5 if it turns out you need more than A Microsoft.