Part 1 page 15 talks about “spending on computation”, and assumes spending saturates at 1% of the GDP of the largest country. This seems potentially odd to me; quite possibly the spending will be done by multinational corporations that view themselves as more “global” than “American” or “British” or whatever, and whose fortunes are more tied to the global economy than to the national economy. At most this gives you a factor of 2-3 doublings, but that’s still 4-6 years on a 2-year doubling time.
Overall I’m not sure how much to believe this hypothesis; my mainline prediction is that corporations grow in power and rootlessness compared to nation-states, but it also seems likely that bits of the global economy will fracture / there will be a push to decentralization over centralization, where (say) Alphabet is more like “global excluding China, where Baidu is supreme” than it is “global.” In that world, I think you still see approximately a 4x increase.
I also don’t have a great sense how we should expect the ‘ability to fund large projects’ to compare between the governments of the past and the megacorps of the future; it seems quite plausible to me that Alphabet, without pressure to do welfare spending / fund the military / etc. could put a much larger fraction of its resources towards building TAI, but also presumably this means Alphabet has many fewer resources than the economy as a whole (because there still will be welfare spending and military funding and so on), and on net this probably works out to 1% of total gdp available for megaprojects.
Yeah, I considered pegging spending to a fraction of GWP instead of a fraction of GDP, but found that when I did this I wanted to push the fraction down because I felt that even though companies are getting increasingly globalized, coordination at the world-scale would probably still be thinner than coordination at the scale of something nation-sized (even if it’s not actually a literal nation). Ultimately, I just went with GDP because there are more reference points for it.
I feel pretty uncertain about this though, and think there’s a lot of room for a more detailed inside-view projection on willingness-to-spend by a firm. We could calculate this by making assumptions about the global surplus created by a transformative model (easily calculable from the definition), the amount of that profit that a firm would capture if it trained a transformative model, and the size of the frontier firm over time (which could be pegged to the global economy or potentially pegged to estimates of profits from training smaller models). We could then back out what a rational firm should be willing to invest.
We could then back out what a rational firm should be willing to invest.
This makes sense, altho I note that I expect the funding here to quite plausibly be ‘irrational.’ For example, some substantial fraction of Microsoft’s value captured is going to global development in a way that seems unlikely to make sense from Microsoft’s bottom line (because Microsoft enriched one of its owners, who then decided to deploy those riches for global development). If building TAI comes out of the ‘altruism’ or ‘exploration’ budget instead of the ‘we expect this to pay back on schedule’ budget, you could see more investment than that last category would justify.
Yeah, I agree there is room for spending to be “irrational”, though I would guess this is more likely in the direction of spending less than the “rational” amount rather than more, because developing TAI could be unprecedentedly profitable and companies’ spending may be limited by capital constraints.
Part 1 page 15 talks about “spending on computation”, and assumes spending saturates at 1% of the GDP of the largest country. This seems potentially odd to me; quite possibly the spending will be done by multinational corporations that view themselves as more “global” than “American” or “British” or whatever, and whose fortunes are more tied to the global economy than to the national economy. At most this gives you a factor of 2-3 doublings, but that’s still 4-6 years on a 2-year doubling time.
Overall I’m not sure how much to believe this hypothesis; my mainline prediction is that corporations grow in power and rootlessness compared to nation-states, but it also seems likely that bits of the global economy will fracture / there will be a push to decentralization over centralization, where (say) Alphabet is more like “global excluding China, where Baidu is supreme” than it is “global.” In that world, I think you still see approximately a 4x increase.
I also don’t have a great sense how we should expect the ‘ability to fund large projects’ to compare between the governments of the past and the megacorps of the future; it seems quite plausible to me that Alphabet, without pressure to do welfare spending / fund the military / etc. could put a much larger fraction of its resources towards building TAI, but also presumably this means Alphabet has many fewer resources than the economy as a whole (because there still will be welfare spending and military funding and so on), and on net this probably works out to 1% of total gdp available for megaprojects.
Yeah, I considered pegging spending to a fraction of GWP instead of a fraction of GDP, but found that when I did this I wanted to push the fraction down because I felt that even though companies are getting increasingly globalized, coordination at the world-scale would probably still be thinner than coordination at the scale of something nation-sized (even if it’s not actually a literal nation). Ultimately, I just went with GDP because there are more reference points for it.
I feel pretty uncertain about this though, and think there’s a lot of room for a more detailed inside-view projection on willingness-to-spend by a firm. We could calculate this by making assumptions about the global surplus created by a transformative model (easily calculable from the definition), the amount of that profit that a firm would capture if it trained a transformative model, and the size of the frontier firm over time (which could be pegged to the global economy or potentially pegged to estimates of profits from training smaller models). We could then back out what a rational firm should be willing to invest.
This makes sense, altho I note that I expect the funding here to quite plausibly be ‘irrational.’ For example, some substantial fraction of Microsoft’s value captured is going to global development in a way that seems unlikely to make sense from Microsoft’s bottom line (because Microsoft enriched one of its owners, who then decided to deploy those riches for global development). If building TAI comes out of the ‘altruism’ or ‘exploration’ budget instead of the ‘we expect this to pay back on schedule’ budget, you could see more investment than that last category would justify.
Yeah, I agree there is room for spending to be “irrational”, though I would guess this is more likely in the direction of spending less than the “rational” amount rather than more, because developing TAI could be unprecedentedly profitable and companies’ spending may be limited by capital constraints.