I really like this analysis. But what about companies allowing agents to interact natively (via API or similar) getting more of the agents inbound since agents are more optimised to go there? If people want to use agents it will cause a lot of lost revenue for companies not allowing agents to interact natively.
It’s only lost revenue if the interactions were providing revenue in the first place. And for consumer tech, if you take away the ability to control the ad-funnels and engagement knobs, there is no revenue to gain. Why do you think all APIs got locked down? Nowadays even pure html delivery is getting locked down to prevent scraping. You think the SEO optimized recipe click holes are incentivized to deliver the content without the ads?
I mean, it’s not impossible that consumers will ignore sites and services that don’t play with their AI. But even so, the content providers would need to find alternative revenue streams – otherwise they’d be bleeding money.
My prediction is that tech companies will continue to compete for dominance over the entry points, apps and human interactions. It will be an adversarial space where coalitions of vertically integrated walled gardens can work. Basically how it is already.
An interesting point from a philosophical perspective!
But if we'd take this into consideration would it mean that 1st world engineer is by definition less inteligent than 3rd world one?
I think the (completely reasonable) knee jerk reaction is a definsive one, but I can imagine absolutarian regime escapee working side-by-side an engineer groomed in expensive, air conditioned lecture rooms. In this imaginary scenario escapee, even if slower and less efficient at the problem at hand would have to be more intelligent generally.
Yes, resource consumption is important. But your car guzzling a lot of gas doesn't mean he drives slower. It just means it drives slower per mol of petrol consumed.
It's good to know whether your system has a high or low 'bang for buck' metric, but that doesn't directly affect how much bang you get.
Also perhaps a factor (with diminishing returns) for response speed?
All else equal, a student who gets 100% on a problem set in 10 minutes is more intelligent than one with the same score after 120 minutes. Likewise an LLM that can respond in 2 seconds is more impressive than one which responds in 30 seconds.
> a student who gets 100% on a problem set in 10 minutes is more intelligent than one with the same score after 120 minutes
According to my mathematical model, the faster student would have higher effectiveness, not necessarily higher intelligence. Resource consumption and speed are practical technological concerns, but they're irrelevant in a theorical conceptualization of intelligence.
Maybe. If I could ask a AI to come up with a 50% efficient mass market solar panel, I don’t really care if it takes a few weeks or a year if it can solve that though. I’m not sure if inventiveness or novelness of solution could be a metric. I suppose that is superintelligence rather than AGI? And by then there would be no question of what it is
Who is a better free-thrower, someone who can hit 20 free throws per minute on Earth, or the same thrower who logged 20 million free throws in the apparent two years he was gone but comes back ready for retirement?
Why should one kind of phenomenon which slows down performance on the test be given a special "you're more intelligent than you seem" exception, but not others?
If we are required to break the seal on the black-box and investigate the exactly how the agent is operating in order to judge its "intelligence"... Doesn't that kinda ruin the up-thread stuff about judging with equations?
One possibility is total cooperation on the basic needs (free for all) and a "capitalistic" system on the luxury needs. See https://lorenzopieri.com/post_scarcity/
The previous poster is gwern... Regardless, peer review does not mean that the arguments of the paper are correct (and viceversa), as gwern just shown.
The previous poster is not gwern. Gwern posted after. Gwern yet again agreed with me after failing 4 times in a row to get a paragraph without the letter e in it. (He finally got it on the 5th time...)