One way to operationalize “160 years of human time” is “thing that can be achieved by a 160-person organisation in 1 year”, which seems like it would make sense?
Unfortunately, when dealing with tasks such as software development it is nowhere near as linear as that.
The meta-tasks of each additional dev needing to be brought up to speed on the intricacies of the project, as well as lost efficiency from poor communication/waiting on others to finish things means you usually get diminishing (or even inverse) returns from adding more people to the project. See: The Mythical Man Month
Possibly, but then you have to consider you can spin up possibly arbitrarily many instances of the LLM as well, in which case you might expect the trend to go even faster, as now you’re scaling on 2 axes, and we know parallel compute scales exceptionally well.
Parallel years don’t trade off exactly with years in series, but “20 people given 8 years” might do much more than 160 given one, or 1 given 160, depending on the task.
One way to operationalize “160 years of human time” is “thing that can be achieved by a 160-person organisation in 1 year”, which seems like it would make sense?
Unfortunately, when dealing with tasks such as software development it is nowhere near as linear as that.
The meta-tasks of each additional dev needing to be brought up to speed on the intricacies of the project, as well as lost efficiency from poor communication/waiting on others to finish things means you usually get diminishing (or even inverse) returns from adding more people to the project.
See: The Mythical Man Month
Not if some critical paths are irreducibly serial.
Possibly, but then you have to consider you can spin up possibly arbitrarily many instances of the LLM as well, in which case you might expect the trend to go even faster, as now you’re scaling on 2 axes, and we know parallel compute scales exceptionally well.
Parallel years don’t trade off exactly with years in series, but “20 people given 8 years” might do much more than 160 given one, or 1 given 160, depending on the task.