[Crossposted on Windows In Theory]
“Modern humans first emerged about 100,000 years ago. For the next 99,800 years or so, nothing happened. Well, not quite nothing. There were wars, political intrigue, the invention of agriculture -- but none of that stuff had much effect on the quality of people's lives. Almost everyone lived on the modern equivalent of $400 to $600 a year, just above the subsistence level …
Then -- just a couple of hundred years ago, maybe 10 generations -- people started getting richer. And richer and richer still. Per capita income, at least in the West, began to grow at the unprecedented rate of about three quarters of a percent per year. A couple of decades later, the same thing was happening around the world.” Steven Lundsburg
METR has had a very influential work by Kwa and West et al on measuring AI's ability to complete long tasks. Its main result is the following remarkable graph:
On the X axis is the release date of flagship LLMs. On the Y axis is the following measure of their capabilities: take software-engineering tasks that these models can succeed in solving 50% of the time, and [...]
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Outline:
(02:44) Factors impacting the intercept
(04:32) Factors impacting the slope/shape
(09:04) Sigmoidal relationship
(10:39) Decreasing costs
(11:58) Implications for GDP growth
(18:17) Intuition from METR tasks
(20:25) AI as increasing population
(23:03) Substitution and automation effects
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First published:
November 4th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QQAWu7D6TceHwqhjm/thoughts-by-a-non-economist-on-ai-and-economics
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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