Dwarkesh Patel

Yeah.

But I guess maybe less abstractly and more sort of like qualitatively, do you expect something to feel like, okay, because this thing can either think so fast or has so many copies or the copies can merge back in themselves or is quote unquote much smarter, any number of advantages an AI might have.

It will qualitatively, the civilization in which these AIs exist will just feel qualitatively different from human civilization.

Let me probe on that a bit.

It's not clear to me that loss of control and loss of understanding are the same things.

A board of directors at, like, whatever, TSMC, Intel, name a random company, they're just, like, prestigious 80-year-olds.

They have very little understanding.

And maybe they don't practically actually have control.

But...

Or, actually, maybe a better example is the president of the United States.

The president has a lot of fucking power.

I'm not trying to make a good statement about the current operant, but maybe I am.

But, like, the actual level of understanding is very different from the level of control.

How come?

I mean, the loss of understanding is obvious, but why a loss of control?

It is not the fact that they are smarter than us that is resulting in a loss of control.

It is the fact that they are competing with each other and whatever arises out of that competition that leads to the loss of control.

Yeah, yeah.

This is a question I should have asked earlier.

So we were talking about how currently it feels like when you're doing AI engineering or AI research, these models are more like in the category of compiler rather than in the category of a replacement.