I like pointing out this confusion. Here’s a grab-bag of some of the things I use it for, to try to pull them apart:
actors/institutions far away from the compute frontier produce breakthroughs in AI/AGI tech (juxtaposing “only the top 100 labs” vs “a couple hackers in a garage”)
once a sufficient AI/AGI capability is reached, that it will be quickly optimized to use much less compute
amount of “optimization pressure” (in terms of research effort) pursuing AI/AGI tech, and the likelihood that they missed low-hanging fruit
how far AI/AGI research/products are away from the highest-value-marginal-use of compute, and how changes making AI/AGI the biggest marginal profit of compute would change things
the legibility of AI/AGI research progress (e.g. in a high-overhang world, small/illegible labs can make lots of progress)
the likelihood of compute-control interventions to change the trajectory of AI/AGI research
the asymmetry between compute-to-build (~=training) and compute-to-run (~=inference) of advanced AI/AGI technology
I like pointing out this confusion. Here’s a grab-bag of some of the things I use it for, to try to pull them apart:
actors/institutions far away from the compute frontier produce breakthroughs in AI/AGI tech (juxtaposing “only the top 100 labs” vs “a couple hackers in a garage”)
once a sufficient AI/AGI capability is reached, that it will be quickly optimized to use much less compute
amount of “optimization pressure” (in terms of research effort) pursuing AI/AGI tech, and the likelihood that they missed low-hanging fruit
how far AI/AGI research/products are away from the highest-value-marginal-use of compute, and how changes making AI/AGI the biggest marginal profit of compute would change things
the legibility of AI/AGI research progress (e.g. in a high-overhang world, small/illegible labs can make lots of progress)
the likelihood of compute-control interventions to change the trajectory of AI/AGI research
the asymmetry between compute-to-build (~=training) and compute-to-run (~=inference) of advanced AI/AGI technology
probably also others im forgetting