Keep in mind that we’re now at the stage of “Leading AI labs can raise tens to hundreds of billions of dollars to fund continued development of their technology and infrastructure.” AKA in the next couple of years we’ll see AI investment comparable to or exceeding the total that has ever been invested in the field. Calendar time is not the primary metric, when effort is scaling this fast.
A lot of that next wave of funding will go to physical infrastructure, but if there is an identified research bottleneck, with a plausible claim to being the major bottleneck to AGI, then what happens next? Especially if it happens just as the not-quite-AGI models make existing SWEs and AI researchers etc. much more productive by gradually automating their more boilerplate tasks. Seems to me like the companies and investors just do the obvious thing and raise the money to hire an army of researchers in every plausibly relevant field (including math, neurobiology, philosophy, and many others) to collaborate. Who cares if most of the effort and money are wasted? The payoff for the fraction (faction?) that succeeds isn’t the usual VC target of 10-100x, it’s “many multiples of the current total world economy.”
Keep in mind that we’re now at the stage of “Leading AI labs can raise tens to hundreds of billions of dollars to fund continued development of their technology and infrastructure.” AKA in the next couple of years we’ll see AI investment comparable to or exceeding the total that has ever been invested in the field. Calendar time is not the primary metric, when effort is scaling this fast.
A lot of that next wave of funding will go to physical infrastructure, but if there is an identified research bottleneck, with a plausible claim to being the major bottleneck to AGI, then what happens next? Especially if it happens just as the not-quite-AGI models make existing SWEs and AI researchers etc. much more productive by gradually automating their more boilerplate tasks. Seems to me like the companies and investors just do the obvious thing and raise the money to hire an army of researchers in every plausibly relevant field (including math, neurobiology, philosophy, and many others) to collaborate. Who cares if most of the effort and money are wasted? The payoff for the fraction (faction?) that succeeds isn’t the usual VC target of 10-100x, it’s “many multiples of the current total world economy.”