The actual report is by Epoch AI, which is financed by totally independent funds like (Eric) Schmidt Sciences.
Professor Tabarrok uncritically praises the report, which might lead to the conclusion that either human intelligence or moral standards are "falling rapidly".
In my career I've worked with people with PHDs in Physics. People with advanced degrees in fluid dynamics and turbine engineering, people with chemistry and ChemE degrees, postdocs in Geology.
All were working alongside me, a self-taught programmer making websites.
I've long thought that there's an oversupply of smart people in the world but for the field of software development, which was hiding that fact by soaking all of them up.
If SDE is collapsing as a field, a whole bunch of people who thought their intelligence and credentials guaranteed them a comfortable life are in for a shock.
This is really looking at the problem from the wrong angle. It’s not that we don’t need all those degrees. The problem is that tech companies are making so much money that it makes other industries practically irrelevant when it comes to return on investment. It has thrown the economy completely off balance.
I was talking to the turbine engineer at lunch one day and the way he put it is this:
There are about five companies who hire people with his background. They all go through boom and bust cycles together. When he graduated they were in a bust cycle and nobody was hiring new graduates, so he found a job in software. He was glad because the pay and working conditions are better, and at the time (a few years ago) it seemed like software engineering was a safe career with lots of employers, which turbine engineering was not.
How would you propose an economy not be organized around money? Any examples you could think of that have worked well? I would also ask that in doing so if you can consider how these changes would work with today's nation states and the scale of 8 billion people or so too.
> If SDE is collapsing as a field, a whole bunch of people who thought their intelligence and credentials guaranteed them a comfortable life are in for a shock.
Even if we accept your precondition as true, that SWEs contain multitudes of smart people who will jump to other industries, I don't think the conclusion holds.
In the US at least, SWEs are among the most entrepreneurial industry members. They'll bring that attitude to whatever their new industry is. I think there will be an explosion of new startups in different areas, and we'll Jevons Paradox our way forwards.
Price of human intelligence is going up actually, because there's ever-decreasing amount of it, and we've invented a cheap substitute that makes people even stupider.
In schools there are massive changes. I was told that kids are more relaxed and care less about education and that the value of the smart kids, the know it all kids, is going down as more students can access Ai and they are not as helpless as they were when failing to tune in while in the class. The dynamics are changing and students are less suicidal too apparently because the pressure to deliver scholastically is going down because no one knows what the future holds and what will be valued.
I'd expect this to be temporary while the educational system figures out how to manage LLM-bolstered students.
The intern I worked with last year said her graduating class all felt like they were the last "real" graduates. Meaning: the class after her had less credibility in her eyes, having been presumed to have used AI to get past the "pons asinorum"/"bridge of asses".
Can you prove to me that the price of human intelligence is going up? At best it is as it always has been, intelligence in some fields is going up.
It's generally true that the rarer something is the more valuable that is, but only if there are enough potential buyers of the thing that can recognize it. If there is an ever-decreasing amount of intelligence there is probably an ever-increasing amount of stupidity - so will the stupid be smart enough to reward the intelligent with high paid positions?
What I suppose is actually that human intelligence will become more monetizable, by allowing those with it to better take advantage of their unrecognizable ability. But only if the interlocking systems of humanity do not fall apart and destroy the world due to there not being enough intelligent people left to make things work, as per various works of science fiction on the subject.
That's the issue. No one can really systematize "discovery".
How many "group thinkers", "creatives", "non-group thinkers", "nihilists", "anarchists", "contemplatives" in the last - say, 500 years, 5000 years, whatever - have been occasioned by the fall of an Apple? Or the fall of a branch? Or a leaf? Or what have you?
Why did it spark a new flame in the mind of Newton? Science can't explain. If we could, we'd teach everyone to be that sort of contemplative.
I frequently have speculative conversations about what (good-leaning) post-AGI societies might look like.
When asked about how one might attain social mobility in such a society, where the intrinsic value of our intelligence and ability to do labor is gone, I unironically respond with "be hot".
If human intelligence stops being the trait that propels one up the socioeconomic ladder, it will not be good looks that takes its place. The ability to project physical force will become currency. This is why AI could cause civilized societies to completely unwind.
Talking pretty, too -- which takes some intelligence, but not too much. The era of the awkward nerd is over. The world is returning to its natural order, with the slimy salesman in the lead.
Have you seen their wives with lip and cheek injections lately? I am not saying that they are pretty by old standards; to each their own.. it is a new standard of beauty in the age of Ai I suppose; mass transformation of beauty standards is a thing..
I have been searching for a good term or name for what we are actually buying. A "probabilistic search for a reasoning chain through a semantic space" is about as close as I've gotten and I have a feeling it's not exactly accurate either.
No, they can just solve tasks verifiably. Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards. Pure next-token supervision is only in the pre-training phase for modern LLM agents. They can also define new RL environments and pose new challenges to themselves and train themselves to solve them faster. Yes, at some point some human steering and judgment comes in as to what sorts of tasks to train towards. But there is no obvious taper-off at human level.
In the age of AI, human super-intelligence, is extremely valuable. But yeah, just being intelligent? Not so much.
Just to illustrate, many have complained that big AI labs "buy" startups only because they want to acqui-hire the Stanford/CalTech/MIT PhDs who started it. Then they pretty much $#!t-can the rest of the people who were, to be fair, mostly just run of the mill UTexas/Umichigan/UofwhateverState TF/PyTorch monkeys. But the point is that in the old days, the second tier guys would have made out like bandits as well.
I think that was, kind of, the start of human intelligence becoming a winner take all game. The AI's only need to learn the latest and greatest from one person before they can leverage that value everywhere. And business is not likely to care too much about who that person is. They will care even less about the people who are not that person.
> AIDE demonstrates that recursive self-improvement at the harness layer can produce transferable gains in an AI research agent’s research efficiency. During the recursive self-improvement run, the loop accepted seven rewrites, each under a fixed evaluation budget (section 3.2). Under this fixed evaluation budget, gains in optimization capability on AI R&D tasks translate to gains in research efficiency."
Which reduces the price for hacking, which reduces the price of societal and technological rent-seeking aka parasitism, resulting in a unprecedented buildup of hatred on non-society contributing, extractive intelligence/parasitism.
We are going to get lynchmobs hanging parasites and burning down data-centers before long.
If the Trump administration has taught me anything, OpenAI will become a major political power and convince said lynch mobs to burn minorities and people of different sexual persuasion in the street rather than go after the people causing their problems.
It may be true for text outputs, but it's absolutely untrue for other modalities: image, speech, voice, and embedding. Heck, embedding models haven't even been updated in years.
These ML/LLM/AI are systems where no one will ever be accountable for and guarantee its stability, safety, and its value.
ML/LLM/AI may be useful, but it must always be considered unauthorized, mistrust, experimental, unverified, always probable to fail on each iteration. Its data must always be accountably supervized by an alive human, who realizes responsibility, life, pain, art, effort, love... Always, even at 2999+ years/times. No life/pain/art/love is no sense/trust/confidence/respect/safety.
That is, it may be fun to play with as a toy, as any ML/LLM/AI based system, where no trust exist but only probability, entropy, chance, luck... but nothing serious, time-rewarding, or humane enough to appreciate and love it in the long run.
An actual Developer is someone who prioritizes thinking and solution finding relying on something deterministic and accountable.
All systems based on LLM, ML, or anything that is algorithmically based on feedback system, learning, training, is indeterministic, and hence, always inaccurate, unreliable, and irresponsible systems, by design.
The process of art-working, coding, programming, development, solution finding... that feel of an achievement. This is what I understand, too. There's no achievement in anything AI-driven - it based on luck/moment/probability/chance.
"Oh My God! Please, all Gods, make this AI output the finally correct code! Please!"
Fudge it.
And you also pay for it. You pay and depend on it, on the the luck, for the chance, for the probability someone controls for you over an API or algorithm you don't even know or cannot verify due its "self-training" design, or it being close-sourced.
> ...you're gatekeeping programming... you are not seeing the big picture... you are missing opportunities...
No, sorry, never. I do not agree with that. These "responses" are coming from infants, immature, children, I believe, sorry... from those who could not care less about the development, responsibility, the overall process of the life of us, people, to find solutions, to reach the goals, to treasure achievements, to write our history with actual names of people on papers sign on papers by hand... for what will leave after us, with art, statues, quotes... in the infinite history of the ineffably magnificent world...
Your name should be in the code you write alone or with a team, your commits, solutions. Your work must be acknowledged and kept in the history. You should be always a respectable alive artist, who is responsible for their work. Our history must evolve, be preserved, respected, appreciated, and shine with glory of our achievements with human names in it for the incredibly marvelous future of opportunities, discoveries, love, and purely magnificent marvel.
There's whole space out there, still, and we must add and keep human names in the history cherished.
> Machines should work. People should think. ~ IBM
Absolute BS, my experience is people are using this "intelligence" to do more dumb shit. I'm not seeing intelligence, I'm seeing unqualified people wielding power tools but they don't know any basic carpentry skills.
When intelligence is seen as a means to an end, rather than the lifeblood of your own perception, it makes sense the "price" goes down. What's being bought is, after all, artificial intelligence.
The price of intelligence is the same. What's being lowered is the standard of living.
I disagree, there is no such thing as artificial intelligence, there is only intelligence.
>When intelligence is seen as a means to an end
Because it is also a means to an end regardless of whatever else it can do. It is a dimension in the problem space of survival.
We as humans are now feeling pressure on our intelligence, whereas us humans have been putting a shitload of pressure on just about every other intelligent creature for the last 100,000 years.
This is really what the property owning class wants- they know they are not that smart and they have always paid other people to be smart for them, but the fact that the time of smart, educated people is expensive has always galled them.
As another commenter said, many of us have viewed our intelligence as a key part of our personhood and how we perceive and interact with the world. But capitalism has found a way to convert that, too, into a purchaseable commodity.
If intelligence is now meaningless and being perceptive is worthless, all that remains is the ugliness of stupid power.
> If intelligence is now meaningless and being perceptive is worthless, all that remains is the ugliness of stupid power.
I don't disagree that there are some truly awful people in power in certain places right now, but this statement is ridiculous. Many intelligent and perceptive people are very cruel or foolish.
The actual report is by Epoch AI, which is financed by totally independent funds like (Eric) Schmidt Sciences.
Professor Tabarrok uncritically praises the report, which might lead to the conclusion that either human intelligence or moral standards are "falling rapidly".
What possible ideological message could that blog post be pushing?
I mean, this is more or less true of Marginal Revolution for over a decade now...
What? The report is about ai performance and cost.
Price of human intelligence is also falling rapidly. I suspect looking pretty is going to go up in value more rapidly.
In my career I've worked with people with PHDs in Physics. People with advanced degrees in fluid dynamics and turbine engineering, people with chemistry and ChemE degrees, postdocs in Geology.
All were working alongside me, a self-taught programmer making websites.
I've long thought that there's an oversupply of smart people in the world but for the field of software development, which was hiding that fact by soaking all of them up.
If SDE is collapsing as a field, a whole bunch of people who thought their intelligence and credentials guaranteed them a comfortable life are in for a shock.
This is really looking at the problem from the wrong angle. It’s not that we don’t need all those degrees. The problem is that tech companies are making so much money that it makes other industries practically irrelevant when it comes to return on investment. It has thrown the economy completely off balance.
I was talking to the turbine engineer at lunch one day and the way he put it is this:
There are about five companies who hire people with his background. They all go through boom and bust cycles together. When he graduated they were in a bust cycle and nobody was hiring new graduates, so he found a job in software. He was glad because the pay and working conditions are better, and at the time (a few years ago) it seemed like software engineering was a safe career with lots of employers, which turbine engineering was not.
Strongly agree. Perhaps an economy shouldn’t be organized around money.
How would you propose an economy not be organized around money? Any examples you could think of that have worked well? I would also ask that in doing so if you can consider how these changes would work with today's nation states and the scale of 8 billion people or so too.
I find answers to this question meet idealogical hand waving more than concrete action plans or examples of success. YMMV
> If SDE is collapsing as a field, a whole bunch of people who thought their intelligence and credentials guaranteed them a comfortable life are in for a shock.
Even if we accept your precondition as true, that SWEs contain multitudes of smart people who will jump to other industries, I don't think the conclusion holds.
In the US at least, SWEs are among the most entrepreneurial industry members. They'll bring that attitude to whatever their new industry is. I think there will be an explosion of new startups in different areas, and we'll Jevons Paradox our way forwards.
I guess we're going to have a bunch of people innovating on jet turbines in their garages?
Price of human intelligence is going up actually, because there's ever-decreasing amount of it, and we've invented a cheap substitute that makes people even stupider.
In schools there are massive changes. I was told that kids are more relaxed and care less about education and that the value of the smart kids, the know it all kids, is going down as more students can access Ai and they are not as helpless as they were when failing to tune in while in the class. The dynamics are changing and students are less suicidal too apparently because the pressure to deliver scholastically is going down because no one knows what the future holds and what will be valued.
I'd expect this to be temporary while the educational system figures out how to manage LLM-bolstered students.
The intern I worked with last year said her graduating class all felt like they were the last "real" graduates. Meaning: the class after her had less credibility in her eyes, having been presumed to have used AI to get past the "pons asinorum"/"bridge of asses".
Can you prove to me that the price of human intelligence is going up? At best it is as it always has been, intelligence in some fields is going up.
It's generally true that the rarer something is the more valuable that is, but only if there are enough potential buyers of the thing that can recognize it. If there is an ever-decreasing amount of intelligence there is probably an ever-increasing amount of stupidity - so will the stupid be smart enough to reward the intelligent with high paid positions?
What I suppose is actually that human intelligence will become more monetizable, by allowing those with it to better take advantage of their unrecognizable ability. But only if the interlocking systems of humanity do not fall apart and destroy the world due to there not being enough intelligent people left to make things work, as per various works of science fiction on the subject.
Group think is highly unlikely to provide new discoveries.
Well, I mean, neither is non-group think.
That's the issue. No one can really systematize "discovery".
How many "group thinkers", "creatives", "non-group thinkers", "nihilists", "anarchists", "contemplatives" in the last - say, 500 years, 5000 years, whatever - have been occasioned by the fall of an Apple? Or the fall of a branch? Or a leaf? Or what have you?
Why did it spark a new flame in the mind of Newton? Science can't explain. If we could, we'd teach everyone to be that sort of contemplative.
I frequently have speculative conversations about what (good-leaning) post-AGI societies might look like.
When asked about how one might attain social mobility in such a society, where the intrinsic value of our intelligence and ability to do labor is gone, I unironically respond with "be hot".
If human intelligence stops being the trait that propels one up the socioeconomic ladder, it will not be good looks that takes its place. The ability to project physical force will become currency. This is why AI could cause civilized societies to completely unwind.
Talking pretty, too -- which takes some intelligence, but not too much. The era of the awkward nerd is over. The world is returning to its natural order, with the slimy salesman in the lead.
You don’t have to look pretty to become an oligarch these days. Have you seen those guys?
Have you seen their wives with lip and cheek injections lately? I am not saying that they are pretty by old standards; to each their own.. it is a new standard of beauty in the age of Ai I suppose; mass transformation of beauty standards is a thing..
Cost per token goes down yes. But are you using more tokens per task/ prompt/ project?
Jeaveons paradox. The cheaper and better something becomes the more of it you use.
But in general on tasks with a finite number of steps to a clear goal you use less tokens.
I love marginal revolution. But I'm not fond of the unit stated. I dont believe we're buying intelligence. I'm sure marketing will run with it though.
I have been searching for a good term or name for what we are actually buying. A "probabilistic search for a reasoning chain through a semantic space" is about as close as I've gotten and I have a feeling it's not exactly accurate either.
Well, since llms need matterial for self-education, someone still had to be inteligent enough. Or llms will freeze their “intelect” at some point.
No, they can just solve tasks verifiably. Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards. Pure next-token supervision is only in the pre-training phase for modern LLM agents. They can also define new RL environments and pose new challenges to themselves and train themselves to solve them faster. Yes, at some point some human steering and judgment comes in as to what sorts of tasks to train towards. But there is no obvious taper-off at human level.
Well, someone. But not necessarily anyone else.
This is the key.
In the age of AI, human super-intelligence, is extremely valuable. But yeah, just being intelligent? Not so much.
Just to illustrate, many have complained that big AI labs "buy" startups only because they want to acqui-hire the Stanford/CalTech/MIT PhDs who started it. Then they pretty much $#!t-can the rest of the people who were, to be fair, mostly just run of the mill UTexas/Umichigan/UofwhateverState TF/PyTorch monkeys. But the point is that in the old days, the second tier guys would have made out like bandits as well.
I think that was, kind of, the start of human intelligence becoming a winner take all game. The AI's only need to learn the latest and greatest from one person before they can leverage that value everywhere. And business is not likely to care too much about who that person is. They will care even less about the people who are not that person.
> Well, since llms need matterial for self-education, someone still had to be inteligent enough.
Not necessarily. https://arxiv.org/html/2609.26457v1
Surprisingly, this isn't necessarily true.
To take an intuition: there are lots of problems that are easier to pose and to check than they are to solve, in mathematics.
Why would it freeze if they can create more training material. Its already been shown synthetic training data is just as good if not better.
> Its already been shown synthetic training data is just as good if not better.
Source, please! I'm a machine learning layperson but how can this not be overfitting?
For example, an LLM can prove a new theorem in math, verify it in Lean (so it is definitely true), and then prove more things based on that.
AI-generated data might not always be that useful, but at least in this case it obviously is.
https://arxiv.org/html/2609.26457v1
> AIDE demonstrates that recursive self-improvement at the harness layer can produce transferable gains in an AI research agent’s research efficiency. During the recursive self-improvement run, the loop accepted seven rewrites, each under a fixed evaluation budget (section 3.2). Under this fixed evaluation budget, gains in optimization capability on AI R&D tasks translate to gains in research efficiency."
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11873
> The Last AI Built by Humans: Toward Genuine Recursive Self-Improvement
The price of wisdom is unchanged, however
Which reduces the price for hacking, which reduces the price of societal and technological rent-seeking aka parasitism, resulting in a unprecedented buildup of hatred on non-society contributing, extractive intelligence/parasitism.
We are going to get lynchmobs hanging parasites and burning down data-centers before long.
>We are going to get lynchmobs hanging parasites
If the Trump administration has taught me anything, OpenAI will become a major political power and convince said lynch mobs to burn minorities and people of different sexual persuasion in the street rather than go after the people causing their problems.
This makes looksmaxxing even more important, according to my agent's opinion
It may be true for text outputs, but it's absolutely untrue for other modalities: image, speech, voice, and embedding. Heck, embedding models haven't even been updated in years.
These ML/LLM/AI are systems where no one will ever be accountable for and guarantee its stability, safety, and its value.
ML/LLM/AI may be useful, but it must always be considered unauthorized, mistrust, experimental, unverified, always probable to fail on each iteration. Its data must always be accountably supervized by an alive human, who realizes responsibility, life, pain, art, effort, love... Always, even at 2999+ years/times. No life/pain/art/love is no sense/trust/confidence/respect/safety.
That is, it may be fun to play with as a toy, as any ML/LLM/AI based system, where no trust exist but only probability, entropy, chance, luck... but nothing serious, time-rewarding, or humane enough to appreciate and love it in the long run.
An actual Developer is someone who prioritizes thinking and solution finding relying on something deterministic and accountable.
All systems based on LLM, ML, or anything that is algorithmically based on feedback system, learning, training, is indeterministic, and hence, always inaccurate, unreliable, and irresponsible systems, by design.
The process of art-working, coding, programming, development, solution finding... that feel of an achievement. This is what I understand, too. There's no achievement in anything AI-driven - it based on luck/moment/probability/chance.
"Oh My God! Please, all Gods, make this AI output the finally correct code! Please!"
Fudge it.
And you also pay for it. You pay and depend on it, on the the luck, for the chance, for the probability someone controls for you over an API or algorithm you don't even know or cannot verify due its "self-training" design, or it being close-sourced.
> ...you're gatekeeping programming... you are not seeing the big picture... you are missing opportunities...
No, sorry, never. I do not agree with that. These "responses" are coming from infants, immature, children, I believe, sorry... from those who could not care less about the development, responsibility, the overall process of the life of us, people, to find solutions, to reach the goals, to treasure achievements, to write our history with actual names of people on papers sign on papers by hand... for what will leave after us, with art, statues, quotes... in the infinite history of the ineffably magnificent world...
Your name should be in the code you write alone or with a team, your commits, solutions. Your work must be acknowledged and kept in the history. You should be always a respectable alive artist, who is responsible for their work. Our history must evolve, be preserved, respected, appreciated, and shine with glory of our achievements with human names in it for the incredibly marvelous future of opportunities, discoveries, love, and purely magnificent marvel.
There's whole space out there, still, and we must add and keep human names in the history cherished.
> Machines should work. People should think. ~ IBM
Absolute BS, my experience is people are using this "intelligence" to do more dumb shit. I'm not seeing intelligence, I'm seeing unqualified people wielding power tools but they don't know any basic carpentry skills.
When intelligence is seen as a means to an end, rather than the lifeblood of your own perception, it makes sense the "price" goes down. What's being bought is, after all, artificial intelligence.
The price of intelligence is the same. What's being lowered is the standard of living.
>artificial intelligence
I disagree, there is no such thing as artificial intelligence, there is only intelligence.
>When intelligence is seen as a means to an end
Because it is also a means to an end regardless of whatever else it can do. It is a dimension in the problem space of survival.
We as humans are now feeling pressure on our intelligence, whereas us humans have been putting a shitload of pressure on just about every other intelligent creature for the last 100,000 years.
Oh well, if you feel that way you have nothing to worry about. Nothing is being lost here but opportunities. :-)
This is really what the property owning class wants- they know they are not that smart and they have always paid other people to be smart for them, but the fact that the time of smart, educated people is expensive has always galled them.
As another commenter said, many of us have viewed our intelligence as a key part of our personhood and how we perceive and interact with the world. But capitalism has found a way to convert that, too, into a purchaseable commodity.
If intelligence is now meaningless and being perceptive is worthless, all that remains is the ugliness of stupid power.
> If intelligence is now meaningless and being perceptive is worthless, all that remains is the ugliness of stupid power.
I don't disagree that there are some truly awful people in power in certain places right now, but this statement is ridiculous. Many intelligent and perceptive people are very cruel or foolish.
A race to the bottom on price will be very good for profits!