Daniel Kokotajlo

Right now, let's just take biomedicine as an example.

One of the fields you'd want to accelerate, and whenever these CEOs get on podcasts, they're often talking about curing cancer and so forth.

And it seems like a big thing these frontier biomedical research facilities are excited about is the virtual cell.

Now, the virtual cell is some, you know, it takes like a tremendous amount of compute, I assume, to train these DNA foundation models and to do all the other computation necessary to simulate a virtual cell.

if it is the case that the cure for Alzheimer's and cancer and so forth is bottlenecked by the virtual cell, it's not clear if you had a million super intelligences in the 60s and you asked them, cure cancer for me, they would just have to

solve making GPUs at scale, which would require solving all kinds of interesting physics and chemistry problems, uh, material science problems, building process, uh, building fabric, you know, fabs for computer of computing.

And then like going through 40 years of, um, making more and more efficient fabs that can make, you know, do all of Moore's law from scratch.

Uh,

And that's just like one technology.

And it just seems like you just need this broad scale.

The entire economy needs to be upgraded for you to cure cancer in the 60s, right?

Just because you need the GPUs to do the virtual cell, assuming that's the bottleneck.

The super intelligence is not even that smart.

It just yells at every single worker.

Yeah, I mean, that's...

I think both of those examples don't work in your favor.

I think the China example is, like, the China growth miracle could not have occurred if not for their ability to copy technology from the West.

And I don't think there's a world in which they just, I mean, you know, China has a lot of really smart people.

It's a big country in general.

Even then, I think they couldn't have just, like, divined how to make airplanes after becoming a communist...