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.
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.