Rob Wiblin

And that's a change from a few years ago where I do think open AI had like way more of a lead and it seemed more plausible that there would be like a monopoly or a duopoly.

But there are reasons to push in the other direction, which is basically that if you have a super exponential feedback loop, you have a bunch of actors that are growing at an increasingly rapid rate, like first at 2%, then at 4%, then at 8%.

And they don't interact with one another.

You do get a winner-take-all dynamic, where if they're growing on the same growth curve

but one gets to a particular milestone first, the bat leader gets more and more and more powerful and wealthy relative to the laggards.

This is in contrast to exponential growth, where if everyone is growing at 2% forever, then the ratios between more and less wealthy nations or companies stay fixed.

So there is a reason to think that specifically around the time of the intelligence explosion, gaps will begin to grow again.

But I think probably around the start, yeah, it will most likely be the case that you can buy AI labor if you can afford it.

You can buy API credits.

You can go on ChatGPT.com.

And then I think I have a lot of uncertainty about how it evolves from there.

I think it depends a lot on the competition landscape they face.

So basically, if the other companies are really far behind, then I think there's a pretty strong incentive and reason to keep your capabilities secret because you give up like sort of quarterly profits, but maybe you don't care about that because you're running on investment money anyway.

And if you can...

get your AI to help you make better AI to help you make better AI and so on, you could emerge with like superintelligence that might give you a power that rivals nation states or like the ability to just like decisively control how the future goes.

And that might be like very attractive to a sort of power seeking company.

I do think it does involve foregoing short-term profits, though, which means that if competitors are close at your heels and your investors are breathing down your neck to deliver quarterly earnings, it'll be hard.

Well, and then also, your plan is to screw over the investors in this case.

Your plan is to create a superintelligence, not to pay them back.

So create a superintelligence and take over the world, maybe.