There’s the standard software engineer response of “You cannot make a baby in 1 month with 9 pregnant women”. If you don’t have a term in this calculation for the amount of research hours that must be done serially vs the amount of research hours that can be done in parallel, then it will always seem like we have too few people, and should invest vastly more in growth growth growth!
If you find that actually your constraint is serial research output, then you still may conclude you need a lot of people, but you will sacrifice a reasonable amount of growth speed for attracting better serial researchers.
(Possibly this shakes out to mathematicians and physicists, but I don’t want to bring that conversation into here)
I also note that 30x seems like an under-estimate to me, but also too simplified. AIs will make some tasks vastly easier, but won’t help too much with other tasks. We will have a new set of bottlenecks once we reach the “AIs vastly helping with your work” phase. The question to ask is “what will the new bottlenecks be, and who do we have to hire to be prepared for them?”
If you are uncertain, this consideration should lean you much more towards adaptive generalists than the standard academic crop.
There’s the standard software engineer response of “You cannot make a baby in 1 month with 9 pregnant women”. If you don’t have a term in this calculation for the amount of research hours that must be done serially vs the amount of research hours that can be done in parallel, then it will always seem like we have too few people, and should invest vastly more in growth growth growth!
If you find that actually your constraint is serial research output, then you still may conclude you need a lot of people, but you will sacrifice a reasonable amount of growth speed for attracting better serial researchers.
(Possibly this shakes out to mathematicians and physicists, but I don’t want to bring that conversation into here)
I also note that 30x seems like an under-estimate to me, but also too simplified. AIs will make some tasks vastly easier, but won’t help too much with other tasks. We will have a new set of bottlenecks once we reach the “AIs vastly helping with your work” phase. The question to ask is “what will the new bottlenecks be, and who do we have to hire to be prepared for them?”
If you are uncertain, this consideration should lean you much more towards adaptive generalists than the standard academic crop.