Tamay Besiroglu

The question here is, once you get these automated AI researchers and you start this software singularity, your software efficiency is going to improve by many orders of magnitude, while your compute stock, at least in the short run, is going to remain fairly fixed.

So how many ohms of improvement can you get before you become bottlenecked by the second priority equation?

And once you actually factor that in, like how much progress should you expect?

That's the kind of question.

I think people don't have – I think it's hard for people to have good intuitions about this because people usually don't run the experiments.

So you don't get to see –

at a company level or at an industry level, what would have happened if the entire industry had 30 times less compute?

Maybe as an individual, what would happen if you had 30 times less compute?

You might have a better idea about that, but that's a very local experiment, and you might be benefiting a lot from spillovers from other people who actually have more compute.

So because this experiment was never run, it's sort of hard to get direct evidence about the strength of complementarity.

Well, I think that is not quite the right way to do it because I think if you're talking about materials, then I think there's a lot of sense in which different materials can be substitutable for one another in different ways.

You can't use aluminum.

I mean, aluminum is a great metal for making aircraft because it's sort of light and durable and so on.

But you can imagine that you make aircraft with worse metals, and then it just takes more fuel, and it's less efficient to fly.

So there's a sense in which you can compensate and just cost more.

I think it's much harder if you're talking about something like complementarity between labor and capital, complementarity between remote work and in-person work, or skilled or unskilled work.

There are input pairs for which I would expect it to be much more difficult.

For example, you're looking at the complementarity between the quality of leadership of an army and its number of soldiers.

that there is some effect there.

But if you just scale up, you just have excellent leadership, but your army only has 100 people.