Like many of you, I have been watching the OpenAI drama, and I keep thinking about the post-AGI economy. Everyone is talking about the good things that AI can do for us. But what about the consequences, such as economic impacts?
No one is sure what AGI means. I personally think the degree to which ‘inventing AGI’ will be a singular event horizon beyond which everything changes is overstated. It is perhaps more likely to be a more gradual process of taking over more and more human tasks until we’re left just checking and combining the results of some AI process. The LLMs we have now can already be considered AGI in a certain sense (they are extremely general) but clearly lack the reliability to completely change the world yet. So to speak of a ‘post-AGI economy’ is perhaps not very meaningful. We should think instead about the immediate impact of things like LLMs, their strengthenings, and their descendants.