Casey Handmer

So I think it might be a mistake to assume that, well, if we're going to pay a top AI researcher $200,000 a year, well, let's say the sort of AI researcher that I could be, $200,000 a year, that if an AI comes along that's as good as me at that,

Even taking into account the fact that, realistically speaking, I only get maybe 10 hours of really top cognitive work done a week, that it would also be worth $200,000.

Obviously, it'd be worth much more than that in the sense of you can copy-paste its output, and much less than that in the sense that whatever the marginal additional cost of spooling up H100s is.

If some kind of role comes along that the AIs are really well-specialized at and out-compete the humans quickly, then we'd also expect to see that.

both the cost of providing that service to drop drastically at the same time as the overall value generated in the economy by that service would increase a lot.

There's 10 acres of land feeding one megawatt H100 or something that's generating, let's say, a megawatt is 1,000 humans.

So one acre is 1,000 humans worth of cognition.

The implicit land value there is a lot higher than it is as undeveloped desert.

It's also a lot higher than it is as the most productive farmland that humanity has ever had.

Is that right?

20 watts, yeah, could be.

Yeah.

And it could easily be much more than that because neurons are much slower than transistors, obviously.

So probably 10 years ago, one of my friends reminded me, you know, like the way your phone saves power is it goes to sleep between you like tapping out hello.

Like H, it takes a nap for like 10,000 cycles.

It's kind of nuts.

So just that humans, I think Elon's talked about this in the context of self-driving cars as well, which is like anything humans do is like glacially slow from the perspective of a computer.

Yeah.

That's an industrial point and then there's a cultural point as well.

Yeah, so you can ask the question, like, what do you need in order to run, like, what is the minimum amount of matter that you need in order to perform these calculations?