Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu have 2045+ timelines, think the whole "alignment" framing is wrong, don't think an intelligence explosion is plausible, but are convinced we'll see explosive economic growth (economy literally doubling every year or two).This discussion offers a totally different scenario than my recent interview with Scott and Daniel.Ege and Tamay are the co-founders of Mechanize (disclosure - I’m an angel investor), a startup dedicated to fully automating work. Before founding Mechanize, Ege and Tamay worked on AI forecasts at Epoch AI. Watch on Youtube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.----------Sponsors* WorkOS makes it easy to become enterprise-ready. With simple APIs for essential enterprise features like SSO and SCIM, WorkOS helps companies like Vercel, Plaid, and OpenAI meet the requirements of their biggest customers. To learn more about how they can help you do the same, visit workos.com* Scale’s Data Foundry gives major AI labs access to high-quality data to fuel post-training, including advanced reasoning capabilities. If you’re an AI researcher or engineer, learn about how Scale’s Data Foundry and research lab, SEAL, can help you go beyond the current frontier at scale.com/dwarkesh* Google's Gemini Pro 2.5 is the model we use the most at Dwarkesh Podcast: it helps us generate transcripts, identify interesting clips, and code up new tools. If you want to try it for yourself, it's now available in Preview with higher rate limits! Start building with it today at aistudio.google.com.----------Timestamps(00:00:00) - AGI will take another 3 decades(00:22:27) - Even reasoning models lack animal intelligence (00:45:04) - Intelligence explosion(01:00:57) - Ege & Tamay’s story(01:06:24) - Explosive economic growth(01:33:00) - Will there be a separate AI economy?(01:47:08) - Can we predictably influence the future?(02:19:48) - Arms race dynamic(02:29:48) - Is superintelligence a real thing?(02:35:45) - Reasons not to expect explosive growth(02:49:00) - Fully automated firms(02:54:43) - Will central planning work after AGI?(02:58:20) - Career advice Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
Full Episode
Today I'm chatting with Tame Besaroglu and Ege Erdo. They were previously running Epoch AI and are now launching Mechanize, which is a company dedicated to automating all work. One of the interesting points you made recently, Tame, is that the whole idea of the intelligence explosion is mistaken or misleading. Why don't you explain what you were talking about there?
Yeah, I think it's not a very useful concept. It's kind of like calling the Industrial Revolution a horsepower explosion. Like, sure, during the Industrial Revolution, we saw this drastic acceleration in raw physical power.
But there are many other things that were maybe equally important in explaining the acceleration of growth and technological change that we saw during the Industrial Revolution.
What is a way to characterize the broader set of things that the horsepower perspective would miss about the Industrial Revolution?
So I think in the case of the Industrial Revolution, it was a bunch of these complementary changes to many different sectors in the economy. So you had agriculture, you had transportation, you had law and finance, you had urbanization and moving from rural areas into cities.
There were just many different innovations that kind of happened simultaneously that gave rise to this change in the way of economically organizing our society. It wasn't just that we had more horsepower. I mean, that was part of it, but that's not the kind of central thing to focus on when thinking about the Industrial Revolution.
And I think similarly for the development of AI, sure, we'll get a lot of very smart AI systems, But that will be one part among very many different moving parts that explain, you know, why we expect to get this transition and this acceleration and growth and technological change.
Yeah. I want to better understand how you think about that broader transformation. Before we do, the other really interesting part of your worldview is that you have longer timelines to get to AGI than most of the people in San Francisco who think about AI. When do you expect a drop in remote worker replacement? Yeah, maybe for me that would be around like...
20, 45 or... Wow.
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