I see a few posts like this anchoring AGI timelines to company revenue / GDP, most notably from economists. But I’d like to understand where this intuition comes from..It seems to me similar to the biological anchors or back in the day Kurzweilian anchor to FLOP/s.
For me, GDP anchors aren’t any more intuitive to me for AGI/ ASI any more than number of parameters or FLOP/s intuitions. Like I can totally imagine AI companies having revenue of ~10% of GDP (10T) without an AGI, even with current level AIs proliferating over the next 10 years.
First of all, the implication “AGI --> Loads of revenue” does seem to hold. If one of these companies did get to AGI, they’d pretty quickly get to 1T, then 10T, then 100T ARR.
What about the implication “Loads of revenue --> AGI?” That’s trickier. But the basic intuition is that in order for a company like Anthropic to be making 10T ARR, they must be deploying Claude pretty much across the whole economy. Claude must be embedded in basically everything, and providing a lot of value too, otherwise people wouldn’t be paying 10% of world GDP for it. And it seems like a Claude capable enough to provide that much value to that many different diverse industries, would probably be AGI. If there was still some major skill/ability that it lacked, some major way in which humans were superior, then probably that deficiency would prevent it from making $10T ARR, by limiting it to certain industries or roles that don’t require that skill/ability.
The obvious potential limitation to me is robotics/skilled manual labor. Maybe I’m just misunderstanding something fundamental here, but it seems at least plausible to me that there will be significant fractions of skilled manual labor that’s not automated at the point that Claude’s 10% of world GDP (and AI in general is 20%+).
But I can imagine an AI that is the 99.9th percentile across some disciplines but not all. I’d assume we already spend ~10T for things like engineering talent, medical advice, legal etc.. and that seems like AI companies could make that much (given they can capture a lot of the excess value—assume there’s only a single AI lab and there’s no competition if you will). I can imagine something slightly better than today’s AI’s have that level of revenue after proliferating through the economy for another decade.
Even if it’s deficient in a bunch of other things we are good at (writing, comedy, physical labor, making better AI’s etc..) It seems to me you can get very far without all human skills, but just a subset of them.
I agree actually, that maybe AIs not too different from today’s could get to $10T after proliferating into the economy for another decade.
So perhaps Thomas’ argument should be revised to more specifically be about the next two years or so. If Anthropic or OAI make it to $10T by 2029, then that seems like something that couldn’t be achieved with just slightly better versions of current AIs. There just isn’t enough time to build all the products on top of it, transform all the industries, outcompete the dinosaurs, etc. Whereas if they actually do have a drop-in replacement for human professionals at everything, then yes they’d make it to $10T.
I see a few posts like this anchoring AGI timelines to company revenue / GDP, most notably from economists. But I’d like to understand where this intuition comes from..It seems to me similar to the biological anchors or back in the day Kurzweilian anchor to FLOP/s.
For me, GDP anchors aren’t any more intuitive to me for AGI/ ASI any more than number of parameters or FLOP/s intuitions. Like I can totally imagine AI companies having revenue of ~10% of GDP (10T) without an AGI, even with current level AIs proliferating over the next 10 years.
Speaking for myself:
First of all, the implication “AGI --> Loads of revenue” does seem to hold. If one of these companies did get to AGI, they’d pretty quickly get to 1T, then 10T, then 100T ARR.
What about the implication “Loads of revenue --> AGI?” That’s trickier. But the basic intuition is that in order for a company like Anthropic to be making 10T ARR, they must be deploying Claude pretty much across the whole economy. Claude must be embedded in basically everything, and providing a lot of value too, otherwise people wouldn’t be paying 10% of world GDP for it. And it seems like a Claude capable enough to provide that much value to that many different diverse industries, would probably be AGI. If there was still some major skill/ability that it lacked, some major way in which humans were superior, then probably that deficiency would prevent it from making $10T ARR, by limiting it to certain industries or roles that don’t require that skill/ability.
The obvious potential limitation to me is robotics/skilled manual labor. Maybe I’m just misunderstanding something fundamental here, but it seems at least plausible to me that there will be significant fractions of skilled manual labor that’s not automated at the point that Claude’s 10% of world GDP (and AI in general is 20%+).
AGI → loads of revenue path makes sense to me
But I can imagine an AI that is the 99.9th percentile across some disciplines but not all. I’d assume we already spend ~10T for things like engineering talent, medical advice, legal etc.. and that seems like AI companies could make that much (given they can capture a lot of the excess value—assume there’s only a single AI lab and there’s no competition if you will). I can imagine something slightly better than today’s AI’s have that level of revenue after proliferating through the economy for another decade.
Even if it’s deficient in a bunch of other things we are good at (writing, comedy, physical labor, making better AI’s etc..) It seems to me you can get very far without all human skills, but just a subset of them.
I agree actually, that maybe AIs not too different from today’s could get to $10T after proliferating into the economy for another decade.
So perhaps Thomas’ argument should be revised to more specifically be about the next two years or so. If Anthropic or OAI make it to $10T by 2029, then that seems like something that couldn’t be achieved with just slightly better versions of current AIs. There just isn’t enough time to build all the products on top of it, transform all the industries, outcompete the dinosaurs, etc. Whereas if they actually do have a drop-in replacement for human professionals at everything, then yes they’d make it to $10T.