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When do people think that AI productivity gains would start showing up in broad GDP in a noticeable way? I think it will be tough to convince the mainstream to take AI risk seriously until there is tangible proof of its abilities in the real economy, so I guess hopefully whatever point of no return these guys foresee is after AI improvement drives economic growth.
I think right now the default hypothesis should be that AI use is not economically valuable – or, at a minimum, that AI output does not scale with expenses.
The reason I say this is because when Anthropic and GPT hiked their prices – which was probably aligning the value closer to their overall cost to manufacture the product – there was (apparently) an immediate and noticeable climb-down from high-volume AI use on the part of corporate America. If AI was by default economically valuable, then using more would always pay for itself. If someone sold me something that cost them $1.00 for $1.10 and I could reliably sell it for $1.20 I would be a billionaire (and so would they) and I would be a fool to ever stop buying their product. But that's not what is happening with AI.
Now that I've presented the default hypothesis, let me explain why I don't quite agree with it.
First off, token-maxxing was always going to be at least somewhat wasteful. So it's not entirely fair to judge how economically useful AI is by a period when people were literally incentivized to use it as much as possible without rewards for the costs or the product.
Secondly, I suspect (particularly for certain applications) that the "true" price point of AI will work out to be economically viable. However, the economically viable niche may be much smaller (particularly with open models in the mix) than what is necessary to sustain continued maximized R&D. I think it is fairly likely that Anthopic and OpenAI find that there isn't enough demand to cover all of their bills at some point. This does not necessarily mean that Anthropic and OpenAI die, but if the demand for something like Mythos or even Fable at their true cost is limited (and particularly if people start turning to open-source models), what will happen is that R&D will slow down once Anthropic and OpenAI have to stop burning investors money and live off of what they can make. (This would be funny since it means that the free market is better at "the AI pause" than all of the AI safety advocates in the world.)
Finally, right now the big use-case for AI is coding. And let's be real: there is only so much money out there for software. AI could be an incredible coder, the best coder in the world, but at a certain point you would stop printing money with code because there's only so much demand. Even gamers could not consume infinite video games, and if you're Uber or Zillow or whoever than shipping 5x as much code and 2x as many features doesn't actually help you earn money unless the features get you new customers...and even if every new feature AI cranked out for Uber or Zillow was optimized to them get new customers (and wasn't just a useless button that three people think is kinda cool), there is only so much money out there for houses and taxi rides.
So, TLDR, there's not infinite money out there for Anthropic and OpenAI, at least not through software. I do tend to think that light manufacturing and other physical automation are likely be a much more economically lucrative than coding (software is maybe 3% of GDP), if there's a viable path there with LLMs.
At least this is my rough, somewhat tentative model of the world – but I don't work is pretty much any of the fields mentioned above, so take my views here with a grain of salt.
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