ASI is often assumed as the all knowing first-principles thinker.
Sam Altman once said: “We don’t know how we’ll make money. Maybe we’ll create the AGI and then ask it to make us one billion dollars”. Despite that, my read of the Bitter Lesson is that empiricism, not cleverness, is what have been pushing the AI endeavor forward. I have seen my fair share of researchers during the 2010s creating ontologies and programming in Lisp, only to get obliterated by deep learning and brute force.
Machine learning has obliterated humans in fields such as chess, computer vision, and is on track to do so in math and programming. These are themes where if you are given 1,000,000x more compute, you can do 1,000,000x more experiments.
I don’t see how this translates to the rest of the human endeavor.
Medical research will be extremely bound by 1- the amount of humanoid robots doing experiments in the lab and 2- the amount of human trials you can do. You can’t expect to ask the ASI “cure cancer from first principles” and only because the ASI is a super human coder, it’ll have the emerging capability of curing cancer.
If my framing is right, parts of the economy that will benefit from increasing compute budgets will be radically transformed. Parts of the economy where the “real time empiricism” is important will “only get better”.
ASI is often assumed as the all knowing first-principles thinker.
Sam Altman once said: “We don’t know how we’ll make money. Maybe we’ll create the AGI and then ask it to make us one billion dollars”. Despite that, my read of the Bitter Lesson is that empiricism, not cleverness, is what have been pushing the AI endeavor forward. I have seen my fair share of researchers during the 2010s creating ontologies and programming in Lisp, only to get obliterated by deep learning and brute force.
Machine learning has obliterated humans in fields such as chess, computer vision, and is on track to do so in math and programming. These are themes where if you are given 1,000,000x more compute, you can do 1,000,000x more experiments.
I don’t see how this translates to the rest of the human endeavor.
Medical research will be extremely bound by 1- the amount of humanoid robots doing experiments in the lab and 2- the amount of human trials you can do. You can’t expect to ask the ASI “cure cancer from first principles” and only because the ASI is a super human coder, it’ll have the emerging capability of curing cancer.
If my framing is right, parts of the economy that will benefit from increasing compute budgets will be radically transformed. Parts of the economy where the “real time empiricism” is important will “only get better”.