I was very struck by the following claim in Dario Amodei’s recent essay:
I don’t think it is too much of a stretch (if we get a “country of geniuses”) to imagine AI companies, semiconductor companies, and perhaps downstream application companies generating ~$3T in revenue per year, being valued at ~$30T, and leading to personal fortunes well into the trillions.
[Following is in a footnote]: The total value of labor across the economy is $60T/year, so $3T/year would correspond to 5% of this. That amount could be earned by a company that supplied labor for 20% of the cost of humans and had 25% market share, even if the demand for labor did not expand (which it almost certainly would due to the lower cost).
This is really not much money. I read this as making a claim about the value of the sector as a whole, though it’s possible he’s saying that an individual company will achieve that kind of valuation, in which case the sector as a whole might be some multiple higher.
The current market cap of publicly traded tech companies is a bit over $40 trillion on revenue of about $7 trillion. So if the prediction is interpreted as being about the AI sector as a whole, then he’s forecasting it will be smaller than the current tech sector. Depending on how expansively one defines the AI sector, we are already definitely within an order of magnitude of $30 trillion in valuation, and perhaps as much as halfway there.
If he’s describing projections for a single company, then obviously that’s more significant, but it’s still pretty low and not something that could really be classed as “transformative”—this would be a company with a market cap a little under 7x of Nvidia’s current value ($4.6 trillion) and revenue about 8x of Alphabet ($385 bn). It’s a little sticky to compare this to a GDP number, but it suggests that a “country of geniuses” in a data center would be producing economic value somewhere in between current France and Italy.
Perhaps this is just a throwaway line, or perhaps the Anthropic legal team made him scrub out another prediction that could be interpreted as promising Anthropic investors fantastical returns. Another possibility is that he thinks the returns on AI will overwhelmingly flow outside the sector itself. But, these figures just seem really, really low for a world-transforming technology and that makes me wonder about his beliefs.
I was very struck by the following claim in Dario Amodei’s recent essay:
This is really not much money. I read this as making a claim about the value of the sector as a whole, though it’s possible he’s saying that an individual company will achieve that kind of valuation, in which case the sector as a whole might be some multiple higher.
The current market cap of publicly traded tech companies is a bit over $40 trillion on revenue of about $7 trillion. So if the prediction is interpreted as being about the AI sector as a whole, then he’s forecasting it will be smaller than the current tech sector. Depending on how expansively one defines the AI sector, we are already definitely within an order of magnitude of $30 trillion in valuation, and perhaps as much as halfway there.
If he’s describing projections for a single company, then obviously that’s more significant, but it’s still pretty low and not something that could really be classed as “transformative”—this would be a company with a market cap a little under 7x of Nvidia’s current value ($4.6 trillion) and revenue about 8x of Alphabet ($385 bn). It’s a little sticky to compare this to a GDP number, but it suggests that a “country of geniuses” in a data center would be producing economic value somewhere in between current France and Italy.
Perhaps this is just a throwaway line, or perhaps the Anthropic legal team made him scrub out another prediction that could be interpreted as promising Anthropic investors fantastical returns. Another possibility is that he thinks the returns on AI will overwhelmingly flow outside the sector itself. But, these figures just seem really, really low for a world-transforming technology and that makes me wonder about his beliefs.