Ryan Greenblatt: “I think it’s worth noting that AI R&D is a type of task at which the AIs are especially good, because the companies are trying really hard to make their AIs good at AI R&D. It’s also the kind of domain that has a lot of nice properties from the perspective of how AI development works right now. It’s pretty verifiable. You can do a bunch of stuff iteratively, and it’ll hill climb on various metrics. I think once you have AIs which are roughly matching the top human experts in AI R&D, that could kick off a feedback loop where the AIs are doing AI research. That produces smarter AIs. That feeds back in. That feedback loop could be strong enough that you end up with a lot of progress in a short period of time. Maybe my median expectation is something like four or five years of AI progress in a single year. This requires really overcoming a huge amount of diminishing returns in research and basically doing the equivalent of the progress we would have gotten after a really large compute scale-out. So this is a pretty impressive, big thing.”
FT: “The AI threat to Indian jobs is getting increasingly real. While the first signs of this are visible in the technology sector, where leading Indian companies have reduced staffing by 5-6 per cent, job losses are emerging in other sectors as well. A report from Goldman Sachs released last week predicts that 8-12 per cent of non-agricultural employment in India is at risk of being substituted by artificial intelligence. This spans several Indian sectors that account for a large chunk of employment, including manufacturing, healthcare, finance and education. Routine, support-level functions are at the highest risk of being replaced by machines, while those with a physical component are more secure, as are senior-level functions, where AI tends to complement job functions and not replace them.” WSJ: “In China, a huge bulge of working-age people helped amplify sweeping economic reforms that turbocharged its economy starting in the 1980s. Other East Asian nations experienced similar explosive growth. India, by contrast, has struggled to exploit its own demographic dividend. Literacy levels took longer to rise in India, while its health indicators still trail China’s. Indian regulations, despite being more streamlined than in the past, are still onerous for businesses.”
NYTimes: “The year is 2035. You, like most people you know, have a small, button-sized device implanted in your forearm. For a recurring fee, it continuously monitors your blood pressure, core temperature, cardiovascular activity and all other health measures a physician would value. Anything suspicious is promptly flagged to your doctor by a personalized A.I. system. Disease and illness is caught — and treated — as early as possible. This is the healthmaxxing future that the $44 billion global wearable industry is rapidly manifesting, as a swath of smart watches, smart rings and smart bands offer new takes on tracking health and fitness data.”
FT: “There is one complaint whose drumbeat is consistent and powerful across each of the democratic world’s unhappy families — regular people feel they are paying more than ever in taxes while the public services they receive in return are getting worse.”
