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When Will AI Transform the Economy? - by Andre Infante

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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?” Thanks for reading Whatever Remains! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This does seem 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 or productivity so

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 seem 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…

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