Algorithmic efficiency improvements are being made all the time, and will only serve to reduce inference cost, which is already happening. This isn't going to accelerate AI advance. It just makes ChatGPT more profitable.
Why would human level AGI help spin up chip fabs faster, when we already have actual humans who know how to spin them up, and the bottleneck is raising the billions of dollars to build them?
All of these hard take-off fantasies seem to come down to: We get human-level AGI, then magic happens, and we get hard take-off. Why isn't the magic happening when we already have real live humans on the job?
What happened at meta is ludicrous, but labs are clearly willing to pay top-dollar for actual research talent, presumably because they feel like it's still a bottleneck.
A human-level AI wouldn't help unless it also had the experience of these LLM whisperers, so how would it gain that knowledge (not in the training data)? Maybe a human would train it? Couldn't the human train another developer if that really was the bottleneck?
People like Sholto Douglas have said that the actual bottleneck for development speed is compute, not people.
> spinning up chip fabs that much easier
AI already accounts for 92% of U.S. GDP growth. This is a path to disaster.