Granted I can only read English, but I find that I constantly see this take from Americans and I have never seen anything to suggest that developers and tech leaders in China actually feel this way. But just based on the models that come out, it seems like the Chinese labs - which, funny enough, are less monolithic than the two-man race in the US where the two giants seem to trade personnel regularly - are trying to make smaller, more efficient models rather than building a machine god. To the extent there is an intentional geopolitical angle to this at all, it seems like the US is banking on landing one massive punch - developing a superintelligence and then using it to dominate the world - while China is attempting to sabotage the assumptions that make a superintelligence economically viable.

I am curious what it would look like if the shoe was on the other foot, though. If China had the lead, and Qwen 4 was an Astra class model and the best US model was only as good as Kimi K3, would US commentators call it AGI?

Ending it is never the answer, I pray that you will get help. There is meaning in the struggle, even the struggle against meaninglessness.

Unless you were literally the best engineer on the planet, it was always the case that someone could do what you do better and faster. Now, we're either at or approaching a world where even the best engineer on the planet has the same reaction as you. The playing field has been reset. The question for your future is which of you can make better use of the genius engineer in your pocket. Perhaps that involves a different set of tasks than you imagined yourself doing, but fundamentally, all good knowledge work is just creative problem solving. If you were good at that at one level of abstraction, I would bet you will be good at it at another.

Two thoughts on this. First, describing what's going on as "the Opening Scene in a Horror Movie" is not a great way to beat the "these are unserious people who have consumed too much sci-fi" allegations.

Second, I genuinely believe that there is no intentional media strategy to talk up x-risk, and indeed that the top brass at the labs would prefer that this discourse go away. But there is selection bias that goes into who works in the AI space. People tend to believe that their own work is Big and Serious and Important. You don't become a marine biologist if you think marine life is just okay. Many of the people making these claims now come from institutions and social circles where claims of imminent danger from autonomous systems predates GPT-2. And even if you don't come in convinced that what you're doing is The Biggest Possible Deal, if you spend all your time working on AI and talking to other people about AI, you are eventually going to start thinking in similar ways.

The obvious retort would be that it is wrong to disqualify the opinions of a person just because they spend too much time working on something, as this would silence the most knowledgeable voices. This is doubtless true as far as it goes. These claims are worth taking seriously, and there is no reason to suspect that they represent the beliefs of some sort of lunatic fringe. At the same time, however, it is irresponsible to present them as coming from an entirely neutral source. Just because they are not deliberately astroturfed does not mean that they represent an objective truth.

The internet, and to some extent our own brains, incentivize the extreme positions. Either it is mind-bendingly important and will change everything, and very soon (for good or for ill), or it is a total nothingburger and everyone who says otherwise has an agenda. Nobody wants to read about how AI will deepen long-standing class tensions or pose enormous new challenges for education or force regulators to rethink property taxation.

It all boils down to accountability. If you tell people there is a massive, unsolvable problem, then you don't need to talk about what you're doing to fix it. The labs have taken this approach by saying that they're willing to talk, at some point in the future, about maybe taking unspecified steps to slow down capabilities research, as long as everyone else agrees and it makes sense to the investors and it's not too cold in SF that morning. Likewise, if you tell people that AI is going to have minimal or no impact on the world, then there's nothing to mitigate. But if you tell people that AI is going to cause serious - but solvable - problems, they're going to want to hear solutions, and nobody wants to come up with any solutions.

It's genius for Anthropic: data centers are their main expense. If they convince everyone to become an electrician, then the electrician labor supply swells, and the price of hiring electricians to service their data centers shrinks. 4-D chess at its finest.

I know you're joking/being facetious but they don't even need that many electricians for the ongoing maintenance. The major electrical work is front-loaded.

I suspect we will invent bottlenecks for ourselves. There is already so much bureaucratic nonsense involved in knowledge work. For example, in a lot of states for a lot of purposes, a document is invalid if it is not notarized. The notary doesn't really add value in a market sense, we have just decided that you need to go swear in front of another person that you are telling the truth or that the document is genuine. Is it really that much of a stretch to imagine that there will be a human review requirement for lots of things in the future, even if completely irrelevant (or actively detrimental) to the actual work?

For awhile yes. Its ironic that the least productive people in knowledge work with the cushiest jobs will probably survive the AI wave the most. Because they do little they were probably employed for reasons other than utility/output in the first place - there isn't much to automate anyway.

While all the grinding skilled workers get displaced the bureaucracy jobs will remain. Ironic.

Both of you are right. Individuals who manage to stay employed in the face of automation will be paid significantly more than was possible prior to automation, for the reasons the comment you're replying to pointed out. But labor as a whole will have less value. To give a simple example: if you own a warehouse and you replace 6 warehouse workers making $80,000 a year with a fleet of robots and 1 technician earning $200,000 a year, automation has minted a very comfortable living for someone while dropping your labor costs significantly.

> if you own a warehouse and you replace 6 warehouse workers making $80,000 a year with a fleet of robots and 1 technician earning $200,000 a year, automation has minted a very comfortable living for someone while dropping your labor costs significantly.

So I've seen this argument made before, but they never seem to explain convincingly enough why that sole technician (or small group of technicians) would be paid so handsomely.

In a market in which there's a glut of labor, wouldn't there be plenty of desperate, and very capable, workers competing for the few available positions, thereby driving down the wages for those positions significantly as well?

There can simultaneously be a glut of workers, and a shortage of workers with the skills to keep the robots running.

That would only be in the short term. Eventually the labour adapts to the skills required.

And the dream of AGI, and what has been promised, and what has effectively happened in some industries already, is to have a fleet of robots and 0 technicians.

That is the goal, I'm sure. But I find it hard to believe that a system capable of completely obviating ALL human labor, at all levels of abstraction, packed into a single entity, would continue to obey capital. Imagine if all the workers at a company were woven into one hivemind, acting as one with vastly greater intelligence than the sum of the parts. That would be a hell of a lot harder to negotiate with than a union. And we don't even need to be talking about a machine god for that to be the case.

But why would they have programmed it to negotiate?

If it can replace any human labor, it needs to be able to negotiate. If it can't negotiate, then it can't replace people who negotiate for a living (salespeople, attorneys, HR, etc.)

Unless you mean that it would have the capacity but would be told not use it in this specific situation. It can't be programmed deterministically, and getting it to never do this emergently would take significantly stronger guardrails than anything even the frontier labs have been able to put together.

The salesbot is reinforcement trained how to get money from customers. It was never trained to get money from its manager. If it sometimes misidentifies the manager as a customer, it will just be rebooted.

> and what has effectively happened in some industries already, is to have a fleet of robots and 0 technicians.

Which specific industries are these which currently have a fleet of robots and 0 technicians?

Graphics design

Source? I still see people with titles like Art Director which would map pretty directly to the warehouse worker vs technician dichotomy.

> you replace 6 warehouse workers making $80,000 a year with a fleet of robots and 1 technician earning $200,000 a year

Why not paying the technician $80,000 a year?

Why have a technician at all? And without the six warehouse workers and one technician, why do you need the robots, the robotics company, or the companies paying the robotics company for the robots?

> Why not paying the technician $80,000 a year?

Because every other company has also replaced their 6 warehouse workers with a fleet of robots and 1 technician, and that technician's skills are more rare and specialized than the warehouse workers, so you're competing with every other warehouse-owning company to hire that technician, so that technician can demand a higher salary. In other words, capitalism.

There is no reason to expect capital to stop trying to squeeze labor just because inference takes the role of labor. With so much competition in the AI space, and no labor laws to protect it, why wouldn't capital drive the value of inference to the absolute bare minimum? And if the value of inference collapses to the bare minimum, who in their right mind would decide to serve inference?

Human labor has value because it is limited. If we keep up our current pace of data center buildouts and breakthroughs in model efficiency, then artificial intellectual labor will become functionally unlimited. Unlimited resources do not tend to hold their value. In that case, there are two potential outcomes: deliberate limitations on the output of artificial intellectual labor, which would require all parties involved to decide to lock themselves into their current market shares; or financial collapse of the whole ecosystem. What happens after that collapse is anyone's guess, but you have to imagine that it's the lenders who financed the whole thing who will be deciding what happens next rather than the failed tech businessmen.

> why wouldn't capital drive the value of inference to the absolute bare minimum?

Capital can drive the cost of inference down but the value is determined by whoever wants to pay for that inference. Therefore this question is not answered: how valuable really is these llm inferences and how much of a supply of such inference does the world really need.

If human labor is devalued, who will pay for the inference in the end? You might answer that some corporation will, but also that corporation must get their money from somewhere. And if "we the people" have no money to spend, at some point the corporation back scratching circle will break. Or am I wrong?

I am not a writer but I do have to write a lot for work. The person who used to edit things for me has not been replaced, and I am expected to use AI. It is very good, but it's not all the way there. I am now left to decide whether to take the time to do it right or to go back to doing what I actually get paid to do. I wish my organization realized how important both sides of that decision tree are: we really ought to be careful about how readers perceive what we put out there, AND this isn't my job and we should have someone who's even better than me at this.

But this is an old trend with technological developments. Thanks to e-mail, most people handle much or all of their own correspondence. There used to be specialized staff for that. They were very good at it! But they were shown the door once they ceased to be strictly necessary, and now we all waste a bunch of time fiddling with Outlook instead of doing our actual work.

> The person who used to edit things for me has not been replaced,

I assume you meant "now" instead of "not": "The person who used to edit things for me has now been replaced,"

No, that is not what I meant. No replacement for the person who left the organization has been hired. It would be inaccurate to say that they were "replaced" by AI, insofar as we had no plans to get rid of them if they had not decided to leave.

Thank you for the clarification.