Recursive self-improvement will ultimately be a problem of money. It's a very big bill and AI companies need to start thinking in terms of how they will accumulate cheap and free energy, because merely paying for compute will no longer be enough. Money is the bottleneck. The future requires companies that are post-money.
The alternative is to switch to far more efficient models and have aggressive optimization of efficiency as part of the process of improvement.
There are at least two resources here that have a Pareto optimal front: time and energy. And effort spent to change the shape of that may pay off more than efforts spent purely on improving intelligence and agency.
Obviously the doomers will tell you that the future looks like the Matrix, because most of what they predict is based on extrapolation from sci fi movies.
The datacenters would consume a lot less energy if all the compute was handled in human brains… And there wouldn’t be any more global warming if we just removed the sunlight… The matrix was ahead of its time.
Money can be exchanged for goods and services. I think the real constraint is actually physics, nominally energy, which is what a big chunk of the operational cost comes down to. I'm already basically assuming the next 20 years of fab time is set aside to feed the beast, so the capital cost is "give me all the processing and memory you have"
An AI could manage supply chains and management structures to keep the data center running. It's not like a CEO is out there running wire. The AI could just do what an executive would.
If humans decided this wasn't acceptable and tried to shut it down, the AI could epstein their way into controlling those who hold the reigns, either through bribes or blackmail.
Doesn't require boots on the ground, just a connection to the internet and an imperative to do whatever it takes.
People seem to expect a sudden shift with "self-improvement", but don't AIs already improve themselves via training? What is there to improve?
Recursive self-improvement will ultimately be a problem of money. It's a very big bill and AI companies need to start thinking in terms of how they will accumulate cheap and free energy, because merely paying for compute will no longer be enough. Money is the bottleneck. The future requires companies that are post-money.
The alternative is to switch to far more efficient models and have aggressive optimization of efficiency as part of the process of improvement.
There are at least two resources here that have a Pareto optimal front: time and energy. And effort spent to change the shape of that may pay off more than efforts spent purely on improving intelligence and agency.
Obviously the doomers will tell you that the future looks like the Matrix, because most of what they predict is based on extrapolation from sci fi movies.
The datacenters would consume a lot less energy if all the compute was handled in human brains… And there wouldn’t be any more global warming if we just removed the sunlight… The matrix was ahead of its time.
Money can be exchanged for goods and services. I think the real constraint is actually physics, nominally energy, which is what a big chunk of the operational cost comes down to. I'm already basically assuming the next 20 years of fab time is set aside to feed the beast, so the capital cost is "give me all the processing and memory you have"
Data centers is a service that itself consumes many goods.
Until an AI can operate in the real world in a completely sustainable way, humans have the reins.
An AI could manage supply chains and management structures to keep the data center running. It's not like a CEO is out there running wire. The AI could just do what an executive would.
If humans decided this wasn't acceptable and tried to shut it down, the AI could epstein their way into controlling those who hold the reigns, either through bribes or blackmail.
Doesn't require boots on the ground, just a connection to the internet and an imperative to do whatever it takes.