Most successful startups slow down a lot after a brief hypergrowth phase. We should be looking for signs that AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic* are experiencing unusually long and persistent hypergrowth: surprisingly little slowdown in growth, or maintaining >2x growth/year at surprisingly high revenue levels like 100B. They are both already growing very surprisingly fast for companies with multiple billions in revenue, to be clear, but whether that continues is valuable evidence.
This could be a sign that present-day models have a higher economic ceiling than we realize (closer to TAI than they might look), or that companies are making real progress towards transformative AI. Most companies don’t dramatically improve their product lineup over and over again after they find initial product-market-fit, so sustained rapid growth means that AI development is leading to a new batch of successful products on a regular basis, i.e. escalating economic usefulness.
*I think companies that serve AI to end-users are the most useful indicators
Most successful startups slow down a lot after a brief hypergrowth phase. We should be looking for signs that AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic* are experiencing unusually long and persistent hypergrowth: surprisingly little slowdown in growth, or maintaining >2x growth/year at surprisingly high revenue levels like 100B. They are both already growing very surprisingly fast for companies with multiple billions in revenue, to be clear, but whether that continues is valuable evidence.
This could be a sign that present-day models have a higher economic ceiling than we realize (closer to TAI than they might look), or that companies are making real progress towards transformative AI. Most companies don’t dramatically improve their product lineup over and over again after they find initial product-market-fit, so sustained rapid growth means that AI development is leading to a new batch of successful products on a regular basis, i.e. escalating economic usefulness.
*I think companies that serve AI to end-users are the most useful indicators