ajafari1

Will Tesla, Waymo, Cruise, or some other company be first to mass commercialize robs-taxis? What are your thoughts?

Many people think the company with the best AI will win the self-driving race. However, AI is only one of many competencies needed for success. Winning is about taking a holistic approach through vertical integration and seeding an ecosystem. From this systems-thinking view, the clear winner is Tesla—by millions of miles.

I updated the post to make it more clear, thanks for feedback.

Entire movie? 75% chance sometime this decade. 25% early next decade.

It was discussed in the prior post: https://aifuture.substack.com/p/the-ai-battle-rages-on

Every once in a while a revolutionary technology comes along that changes everything. While entrepreneurs are focused on Deep Learning applications, futurists are focused on artificial general intelligence (AGI). But literally, no one is talking about the era that’s sandwiched between them with incredible potential. A new era is rising with the AI-job suite.

OpenAI estimates that Github’s Copilot can already complete 37% of coding tasks. DeepMind’s AlphaCode is estimated to be 59% better at coding competitions than Codex. Will automation start in 2023?

I see where you are going and may I suggest this thought experiment: let's say there is a team of 4 developers. AI automates 50% of their work, but there is still a lot of fine-tuning and certainly a lot of time in meetings with co-workers. But, this team has more free time so their company gives them more work. Great, so they are still working at capacity now. However, let's suppose AI gets to 80% automation, and there is no more additional work their company can offer them. That's when one or two, or more of them are at risk of losing their jobs.

Yes, you correctly point out that high cost is a big factor. The other factor in why labor-intensive jobs are difficult, is that robotics has lagged far behind AI software. Even if Tesla or others mass produce robots starting in 2025 or 2030, it will take a very long time before there is enough robots to satisfy the labor-intensive demand globally. Thanks for your readership!

OpenAI estimates that Codex (what powers Github’s Copilot) can already complete 37% of coding tasks. DeepMind’s non-commercial AlphaCode is estimated to be 59% better at coding competitions than Codex. But how close are we to automation? There is a huge demand for developer jobs currently. In light of OpenAI’s DALLE-2 commercialization announcement yesterday, here is a new cross-disciplinary approach to determine how close we are to automation.

After reading the article how close, or far, do you think we are from software development jobs getting automated?

I wrote about this happening two days ago on my sub stack post, "OpenAI will start charging businesses for images based on how many images they request. Just like Amazon Web Services charges businesses for usage across storage, computing, etc. Imagine a simple webpage where OpenAI will list out their AI-job suite, including “jobs” such as software developer, graphics designer, customer support rep, and accountant. You can select which service offerings you’d like to purchase ad-hoc or opt into the full AI-job suite."

In case you are interested in reading the whole take: https://aifuture.substack.com/p/the-ai-battle-rages-on

Not correct. They have a for-profit entity now. That's why there is a huge incentive to monetize. Any for-profit investment gain is capped at 100x, with the rest required to go to their nonprofit. This commercialization is just as I predicted in my substack post 2 days ago that hit the front page of Hacker News: https://aifuture.substack.com/p/the-ai-battle-rages-on

That's the common counterpoint, but is there 50x the demand for developers? I work in tech and I know how hard pressed people are for developer talent but it is not more than a couple fold off. I doubt companies and startups would have enough work to hire >=5x the developers. Thus, AI can be very disruptive to that job function.

Nice! You were very close. With any exponential curve, it takes forever to get to point A, but once there, it's an immediate job to point Z.

And a strategic way for OpenAI to garner more than 1M business and people on their waitlist as I outline in the article.

We are moving too fast to put in adequate safeguards unfortunately. Demis Hassabis, founder of DeepMind, recently mentioned something interesting on a Lex Fridman interview. They are going to double down on safety since the algorithm side has moved much faster than expected.

Moreover, Max Tegmark, MIT scientist and author of the famous book Life 3.0 said this on a podcast last month: "Frankly, this is to me the worst-case scenario we’re on right now — the one I had hoped wouldn’t happen. I had hoped that it was going to be harder to get here, so it would take longer. So we would have more time to do some AI safety. I also hoped that the way we would ultimately get here would be a way where we had more insight into how the system actually worked, so that we could trust it more because we understood it. Instead, what we’re faced with is these humongous black boxes with 200 billion knobs on them and it magically does this stuff."

Right on. When do you expect a productized AI that can replace your average skilled programmer?

Exactly. Any content writer AI, developer AI, graphic designer AI just has to be good enough to cause an economic labor shift. There are plenty of non big tech companies that want affordable labor that can just get the job done. It doesn't need to be insanely good, although imo it will be in short order anyway.

I do believe AI alignment and safety is a huge concern, and unfortunately thinks are moving so fast there is not enough time for society to adapt.

However, if we can safeguard that I am very optimistic about what a sufficiently advanced AI (we don't even need AGI) can do to help with climate change, medical advances, etc. Costs of goods will plummet as things become more abundant.

The question is which path are we on, the utopia or dystopia, or somewhere in between?

I like the way you are thinking and if you are talking about the snapshot of today, that is spot on. However, these models are getting better exponentially. See the improvement from GPT-3 just 2 years ago on this benchmark: https://paperswithcode.com/sota/multi-task-language-understa....

I hope I am wrong so that society has more time to adapt to the worker displacement and downstream policy issues.

Any bets on when the majority of software development is automated? My estimate based on the exponential improvement rate of AI on various tests like MMLU and MATH is within 3 years. I know that might sound crazy, but a year ago it would have been crazy to think that graphics design jobs could be automated by an AI in 2022.

Feel free to disagree and discuss why.

Thanks for reading my deep dive and your comment. If we zoom out to one year ago, most non AI-savvy people would have considered it preposterous that a graphics designer could become AI automated anytime soon. I believe, similar to you, that we are in the same position with software development becoming automated. Most tech people consider it preposterous right now, but watch it happen in the next couple years.

My point about the highly skilled creative workers retaining jobs is that they may have a year or two of lead time before they too get automated by the AI-job suite.

New AI applications by OpenAI and Google are poised to take over creative jobs and much more. This will be a major disruption to jobs, the economy, and life as a whole. Here’s my take on how it will impact your job or business, your investments, and your life.