Curated. There’s an amusing element here: one of the major arguments for concern about powerful AI is how things will fail to generalize out of distribution. There’s a similarish claim here – standard economics thinking not generalizing well to the unfamiliar and assumption-breaking domain of AI.
More broadly, I’ve long felt many people don’t get something like “this is different but actually the same”. As in, AI is different from previous technologies (surprising!) but also fits broader existing trendlines (e.g. the pretty rapid growth of humanity over its history, this is business as usual once you zoom out). Or the different is that there will be something different and beyond LLMs in coming years, but this is on trend as LLMs were different from what came before.
This post helps convey the above. To the extent there are laws of economics, they still hold, but AI, namely artificial people (from an economic perspective at least) require non-standard analysis and the outcome is weird and non-standard too compared to the expectations of many. All in all, kudos!
Curated. There’s an amusing element here: one of the major arguments for concern about powerful AI is how things will fail to generalize out of distribution. There’s a similarish claim here – standard economics thinking not generalizing well to the unfamiliar and assumption-breaking domain of AI.
More broadly, I’ve long felt many people don’t get something like “this is different but actually the same”. As in, AI is different from previous technologies (surprising!) but also fits broader existing trendlines (e.g. the pretty rapid growth of humanity over its history, this is business as usual once you zoom out). Or the different is that there will be something different and beyond LLMs in coming years, but this is on trend as LLMs were different from what came before.
This post helps convey the above. To the extent there are laws of economics, they still hold, but AI, namely artificial people (from an economic perspective at least) require non-standard analysis and the outcome is weird and non-standard too compared to the expectations of many. All in all, kudos!