Accountability Throughput

Most people have had enough of AI, to the point that I almost do not feel like talking or discussing about it anymore. But I will still go ahead because I believe it might add non-zero value to the discourse.

AI companies tout the multi-fold (10x, 100x, 1000x) productivity gains that AI can lead to and the fact that if we do not tap into it, we will be left behind. This FOMO has what has led to the spending and layoff frenzy in the recent years. But I think we need to discuss the aspect of "responsibility"/"accountability" because regardless of how good AI is today, we haven't yet solved this specific problem and it is THE critical determinant in real systems.

For example, as an engineer with some years of experience in my bag, here are my numbers (rookie I know)-

Max code throughput (Amount of working correct code I can write/modify in a good day) = ~200 LoC Max accountability throughout (Amount of code I can directly take responsibility for shipping to a wide user base that depend on the software) = ~50 LoC

Here are the same numbers for a frontier model:

Max code throughout: 1000,000 LoC (assuming unlimited budget, because why not) Max accountability throughput: 0 (this is the killer blow)

Here is the simple argument: Real business are built on accountability and not just raw output. If I increase the raw output by 100x but do not scale my accountability, the economic value is still bottlenecked on accountability. So unless these intelligence companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) start taking accountability for the code that gets generated, it almost does not matter how good the model is. It's still bottlenecked on my accountability throughput.