Scott Alexander

Some people are better at it than others.

And superintelligence would be better at it than the very best of us.

That's right.

Oh, I completely disagree.

Yeah, I disagree also.

Yeah, like, so I think you're over-indexing or cherry-picking some of these fortuitous examples, but there's also things on the other side.

Like, think about the recent history of AGI where there was DeepMind.

Yeah.

There's various other, like, AI companies.

Then there's OpenAI and there's Anthropic.

And, like, there's just this repeated story of, like, big bloated company with tons of money, tons of smart researchers, et cetera, flailing around, trying a ton of different things at different points.

Smaller startup with a vision of we're going to build AGI and, like, overall working towards that vision more coherently with a few cracked, you know, engineers and researchers.

And then they crush the giant company, even though they have less compute, even though they have less researchers.

They're able to do fewer experiments, you know.

Um...

So yeah, I think that there are tons of examples throughout history, including recent relevant AGI history of things in the other way.

I agree that the random fortuitous stuff does happen sometimes and is important, but if it was mostly random fortuitous stuff, that would predict that the giant companies with zillions of people trying zillions of different experiments would be going proportionally faster than the tiny startups that have the vision and the best researchers.

And that basically doesn't happen.

That's right.

We're just thinking that it would take place faster than you might expect.