Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

The market thinks Tesla is worth more than all other automakers combined, that GameStop is a reasonable investment, and laying off engineers is great!

But how many of those are ordered specifically for OpenAI, and are on order as a result of them to begin with? Do you think if we were in a parallel universe where OpenAI ended up partnering with Google or Amazon instead, the GPU shipments would look the same? I think they would reflect wherever OpenAI ended up doing all their compute showing a pretty similar lion's share.

Your claim was that people should care about compute based on what the provider has done in the AI space, but Microsoft was pretty far behind on that side until OpenAI - Google was really the only player in town. Should they have wanted GCP credits instead? Do you care about their AI results or the ex post facto GPU shipments?

Or, if what you actually want to argue is that Anthropic would be able to get more GPUs with Azure than AWS or GCP then this is a different argument which is going to require different evidence than raw GPU shipments.

Yes, considering that AI operates differently from human minds, there are several advantages:

  AI does not experience fatigue or distractions => consistent performance.
  AI can scale its processing power significantly, despite the challenges associated with it (I understand the challenges)
  AI can ingest and process new information at an extraordinary speed.
  AIs can rewrite themselves
  AIs can be multiplicated (solving scarcity of intelligence in manufacturing)
  Once achieving AGI, progress could compound rapidly, for better or worse, due to the above points.

The simplest answer, without adding any extraordinary capabilities to the AGI that veer into magical intelligence, is to have AI assistants that can seemlessly interact with technology the way a human assistant would.

So, if you want to meet with someone, instead of opening you calendar app and looking for an opening, you'd ask your AGI assistant to talk to their AGI assistant and set up a 1h meeting soon. Or, instead of going on Google to find plane tickets, you'd ask you AGI assistant to find the most reasonable tickets for a certain date range.

This would not require any special intelligence more advanced than a human's, but it does require a very general understanding of the human world that is miles beyond what LLMs can achieve today.

Going only slightly further with assumptions about how smart an AGI would be, it could revolutionize education, at any level, by acting as a true personalized tutor for a single student, or even for a small group of students. The single biggest problem in education is that it's impossible to scale the highest quality education - and an AGI with capabilities similar to a college professor would entirely solve that.

> AI in the past (adjusted for 1980s) was pretty well funded.

A tiny fraction of the current funding. 2-4 orders of magnitude less.

> It's just that fundamental scientific discovery bears little relationship to the pallets of cash

Heavy funding may not automatically lead to breakthroughs such as Special Relativity or Quantum Mechanics (though it helps there too). But once the most basic ideas are in place, massive is what causes the breakthroughs like in the Manhatten Project and Apollo Program.

And it's not only the money itself. It's the attention and all the talent that is pulled in due to that.

And in this case, there is also the fear that the competition will reach AGI first, whether the competition is a company or a foreign government.

It's certainly possible the the ability to monetize the investments may lead to some kind of slowdown at some point (like if there is a recession).

But it seems to me that such a recession will have no more impact on the development of AGI than the dotcom bust had for the importance of the internet.