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Comment by ameliaquining | Hacker News Reader

This discrepancy is precisely the reason (or at least one reason) why AI 2027 hypothesizes that all the interesting developments will be happening inside whichever AI lab is in the lead. The kind of AI agent that AI 2027 hypothesizes in that timeframe could do the migration in much less than 24 months, but only if the organization completely changes how it works internally so that everything is driven by the goal of exploiting the AI's capabilities to the maximal extent. Microsoft/GitHub probably can't do that that quickly.

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You're certainly correct that they couldn't, though I don't feel stating "this is why all the interesting developments will be happening inside AI labs" is a fair review of the AI 2027 paper, as it makes many wide-ranging statements about how AI will impact the military, government, medical research, typical corpo-politics, software engineering, and, of course, AI research.

The realization that you're close to making, and I hope I can help you make: If Microsoft & Github can't realize the benefits of AI that quickly; why should anyone believe that the rest of the world would be able to? After all, there are roughly zero "pre-AI" companies that are force-mutating their structure to adopt AI faster than Microsoft is [1].

[1] https://www.theverge.com/tech/780946/microsoft-satya-nadella...

The idea in AI 2027 is that, if even one company can realize the benefits of AI that quickly, that's enough to change everything. Partly because of feedback loops where powerful AI is used to accelerate AI capabilities, and partly because we've already seen OpenAI's customer base go from zero to, like, everybody, in the blink of an eye. (This is not an attempt to weigh in on the ongoing controversy about OpenAI's financial sustainability; rather, the point is that we know that it's possible in this kind of scenario for a single company to attain economy-wide market penetration quickly, so that's not necessarily a big barrier to technological adoption.)

I’ve not read the paper, but it appears to be suffering the same fallacy that AI boosters tend to suffer: the mighty “if.”

Yes, if AI is godlike, then the first company to leverage the machine god will be rewarded.

But it’s not. The “benefits of AI” are a combination of placebo, automation of mediocre work, and few modest points of leverage.

Which companies would, if they alone become radically more effective, actually be able to radically change impact on their industry? The vast majority of companies are in value chains, where practical value creation depends also on the suppliers and customers of the company. Often there are multiple suppliers and customers, and sometimes there are multiple levels of relationships on each side... That places constrains/inefficiencies on how quickly and how much one can achieve.

meanwhile openai is concentrating on making spongebob squarepants police chase videos

That’s not fair.

I also saw a creepy cat in the hat breaking into someone’s home and take a shotgun round to the chest.

How much do you think that meaningfully distracted them from general capabilities-acceleration work? I think not very much, so this doesn't seem like much of an argument.

if you convincingly thought you were in a race to AGI you'd be spending every single resource on it to try and beat the competition

not burning human effort and quintillions of CPU cycles on mickey mouse videos (literally)

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