Substack version here:
https://andreinfante.substack.com/p/when-will-ai-transform-the-economy

A caricature of a common Twitter argument:

”Hey it seems like language models can do a lot of humanlike cognitive tasks, look at this impressive example! That seems like something that would transform the economy.”

“Well, smart guy, these things have been out for a couple of years now. Why isn’t the economy transformed yet?”

This does strike me as a little bit mysterious. The models can do impressive things- solving programming tasks, tackling math and logic puzzles, and answering detailed scientific questions. The median human can barely do these things at all, and the best language models can often do them very well. This seems like an indicator that language models should be well positioned to replace human knowledge workers in droves.

However, even industries that have adopted language models aggressively (e.g. software engineering) are not seeing huge changes to employment [...]

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Outline:

(02:54) A Case Study: A Model of Automating Translation

(11:41) Forecasting Model Improvements

(14:42) Takeaways

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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