This is what I’m talking about when I say people don’t take counterfactuals seriously—they seem to assume nothing could really be different, technology is predetermined. I didn’t even suggest that without scaling early, NLP would have hit an AI winter. For example, if today’s MS and FB had led the AI revolution, with the goals and incentives they had, you really think LLMs would have been their focus?
We can also see what happens to other accessible technologies when there isn’t excitement and market pressure. For example, solar power was abandoned for a couple decades in the 1970s and 1980s. Nuclear was as well.
And even without presuming focus stays away from LLMs much longer, in fact, in our world, we see the tremendous difference between firms that started safety-pilled, and those which did not. So I think you’re ignoring how much founder effects matter, and you’re assuming technologists would by default pay attention to risk, or would embrace conceptual models that relied on a decade of theory and debate which by assumption wouldn’t have existed.
This is what I’m talking about when I say people don’t take counterfactuals seriously—they seem to assume nothing could really be different, technology is predetermined. I didn’t even suggest that without scaling early, NLP would have hit an AI winter. For example, if today’s MS and FB had led the AI revolution, with the goals and incentives they had, you really think LLMs would have been their focus?
We can also see what happens to other accessible technologies when there isn’t excitement and market pressure. For example, solar power was abandoned for a couple decades in the 1970s and 1980s. Nuclear was as well.
And even without presuming focus stays away from LLMs much longer, in fact, in our world, we see the tremendous difference between firms that started safety-pilled, and those which did not. So I think you’re ignoring how much founder effects matter, and you’re assuming technologists would by default pay attention to risk, or would embrace conceptual models that relied on a decade of theory and debate which by assumption wouldn’t have existed.