Based on my essay about AI firms.Huge thanks to Petr and his team for bringing this to life!Watch on YouTube.Thanks to Google for sponsoring. We used their Veo 2 model to make this entire video—it generated everything from the photorealistic humans to the claymation octopuses. If you’re a Gemini Advanced user, you can try Veo 2 now in the Gemini app. Just select Veo 2 in the dropdown, and type your video idea in the prompt bar. Get started today by going to gemini.google.com.To sponsor a future episode, visit dwarkesh.com/advertise. Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
Full Episode
When people think of AGI, they imagine what it would be like to have a personal assistant who answers all their questions and works 24-7. But that just underestimates the real collective edge AIs will have, which has nothing to do with raw IQ, but rather with the fact that they are digital. Currently, firms are extremely bottlenecked in hiring and training people.
But if your workers are AIs, then you can copy them millions of times, with all their skills, judgment, and tacit knowledge intact. This is a fundamentally transformational change because for the first time in history, you can just turn capital into compute and compute into labor.
You can turn trillions of dollars into the electricity, chips, and data centers needed to sustain populations of billions of digital employees. Think about how limited a CEO's knowledge is today. How much did the real Steve Jobs really know about what's happening across Apple's vast empire? He gets filtered reports and dashboards, attends key meetings, and reads strategic summaries.
But he can't possibly absorb the full context of every product launch, every customer interaction, every technical decision made across hundreds of teams. His mental model of Apple is necessarily incomplete. Now imagine Mega Steve, the central AI that will direct our future AI firm.
Just as Tesla's full self-driving AI model can learn from the driving records of millions of drivers, Mega Steve might learn from everything seen by the millions of distilled Steve apparatchiks. Every customer conversation, every engineering decision, every market response. I think it's hard to grapple with how different this will be from human companies and institutions.
You're going to have this blobs with millions of entities rapidly coming into and going out of existence who are each thinking at superhuman speeds. It will be a change in social organization as big as was the transition from hunter-gatherer tribes to a mass of modern joint stock corporations. The boundary between different AI instances starts to blur.
Mega Steve will constantly be spawning specialized distilled copies and reabsorbing what they've learned on their own. Models will communicate directly through latent representations, similar to how the hundreds of different layers in a neural network like GPT-4 already interact. Merging will be a step change in how organizations can accumulate and apply knowledge.
Humanity's great advantage has been social learning, our ability to pass knowledge across generations and build upon it. But human social learning has a terrible handicap. Biological brains don't allow information to be copy-pasted. So you need to spend years, and in many cases decades, teaching people what they need to know in order to do their job.
or consider how clustering talent in cities and top firms produces such outsized benefits, simply because it lowers the friction of knowledge flow between individuals. Future AI firms will accelerate this cultural evolution.
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