“Slow corporations as an intuition pump for AI R&D automation” by ryan_greenblatt, elifland

How much should we expect AI progress to speed up after fully automating AI R&D? This post presents an intuition pump for reasoning about the level of acceleration by talking about different hypothetical companies with different labor forces, amounts of serial time, and compute. Essentially, if you'd expect an AI research lab with substantially less serial time and fewer researchers than current labs (but the same cumulative compute) to make substantially less algorithmic progress, you should also expect a research lab with an army of automated researchers running at much higher serial speed to get correspondingly more done. (And if you'd expect the company with less serial time to make similar amounts of progress, the same reasoning would also imply limited acceleration.) We also discuss potential sources of asymmetry which could break this correspondence and implications of this intuition pump.

The intuition pump

Imagine theoretical AI companies [...]

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Outline:

(01:03) The intuition pump

(03:32) Clarifications

(05:49) Asymmetries

(13:03) Implications

The original text contained 8 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
May 9th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hMSuXTsEHvk4NG6pm/slow-corporations-as-an-intuition-pump-for-ai-r-and-d

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.