The Price of Intelligence Is Falling Rapidly(marginalrevolution.com) |
The Price of Intelligence Is Falling Rapidly(marginalrevolution.com) |
Professor Tabarrok uncritically praises the report, which might lead to the conclusion that either human intelligence or moral standards are "falling rapidly".
All were working alongside me, a self-taught programmer making websites.
I've long thought that there's an oversupply of smart people in the world but for the field of software development, which was hiding that fact by soaking all of them up.
If SDE is collapsing as a field, a whole bunch of people who thought their intelligence and credentials guaranteed them a comfortable life are in for a shock.
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/education-at-a-glance-2...
Even if we accept your precondition as true, that SWEs contain multitudes of smart people who will jump to other industries, I don't think the conclusion holds.
In the US at least, SWEs are among the most entrepreneurial industry members. They'll bring that attitude to whatever their new industry is. I think there will be an explosion of new startups in different areas, and we'll Jevons Paradox our way forwards.
It's generally true that the rarer something is the more valuable that is, but only if there are enough potential buyers of the thing that can recognize it. If there is an ever-decreasing amount of intelligence there is probably an ever-increasing amount of stupidity - so will the stupid be smart enough to reward the intelligent with high paid positions?
What I suppose is actually that human intelligence will become more monetizable, by allowing those with it to better take advantage of their unrecognizable ability. But only if the interlocking systems of humanity do not fall apart and destroy the world due to there not being enough intelligent people left to make things work, as per various works of science fiction on the subject.
Where?
What's your definition of "rapidly"?
I could see an argument for price of human intelligence going down - we're essentially in a global stagflation - which feels like a recession (sometimes moreso) even if it isn't technically one...
Rapidly? I think we have different definitions, or you're only looking in a niche.
I'd also argue that global stagflation doesn't yet have anything to do with AI. My crystal ball doesn't work. Things could change quickly. But I don't see any evidence now.
When asked about how one might attain social mobility in such a society, where the intrinsic value of our intelligence and ability to do labor is gone, I unironically respond with "be hot".
What about the cost? Inference looks like a viable business model for those operators that have access to SOTA model and serving infrastructure, but the investment required to have it is enormous, and appears to be never-ending, because if an operator stops investing aggressively, its model and serving infrastructure quickly become non-competitive, and customers will quickly leave for alternatives.
At some point this will probably happen, but we’re not quite there yet.
The 20 euros GPT plan with GPT 6 Luna (and Astra for doing the tough stuff) and OpenCode Go (8 euros) offer me both way more intelligence and tokens than spending 400 euros just at the beginning of the this summer did.
Today I worked two hours with GPT 6 Luna, have been very productive tackling some hard stuff and...my weekly usage went from 57% to 56%?
You really don't need to use the strongest model for everything. And even chinese open models are effectively few months old sota. You can use mimo 2.6 or DS 4.1 flash on 8 $/months OpenCode and barely ever have to worry about consumption.
What I don't know, and was asking about, is whether the cost of providing that service is also falling rapidly, including the cost of training.
But in general on tasks with a finite number of steps to a clear goal you use less tokens.
In the age of AI, human super-intelligence, is extremely valuable. But yeah, just being intelligent? Not so much.
Just to illustrate, many have complained that big AI labs "buy" startups only because they want to acqui-hire the Stanford/CalTech/MIT PhDs who started it. Then they pretty much $#!t-can the rest of the people who were, to be fair, mostly just run of the mill UTexas/Umichigan/UofwhateverState TF/PyTorch monkeys. But the point is that in the old days, the second tier guys would have made out like bandits as well.
I think that was, kind of, the start of human intelligence becoming a winner take all game. The AI's only need to learn the latest and greatest from one person before they can leverage that value everywhere. And business is not likely to care too much about who that person is. They will care even less about the people who are not that person.
To take an intuition: there are lots of problems that are easier to pose and to check than they are to solve, in mathematics.
Not necessarily. https://arxiv.org/html/2609.26457v1
Source, please! I'm a machine learning layperson but how can this not be overfitting?
This really misses the point. The “threat” (to the profits of big AI companies) is that competition will drive prices down in a race to the bottom. It doesn’t really “help” (drive the profits for big AI companies) if that competition comes from open-ish models or from competing big AI companies or anywhere else.
We are going to get lynchmobs hanging parasites and burning down data-centers before long.
If the Trump administration has taught me anything, OpenAI will become a major political power and convince said lynch mobs to burn minorities and people of different sexual persuasion in the street rather than go after the people causing their problems.
ML/LLM/AI may be useful, but it must always be considered unauthorized, mistrust, experimental, unverified, always probable to fail on each iteration. Its data must always be accountably supervized by an alive human, who realizes responsibility, life, pain, art, effort, love... Always, even at 2999+ years/times. No life/pain/art/love is no sense/trust/confidence/respect/safety.
That is, it may be fun to play with as a toy, as any ML/LLM/AI based system, where no trust exist but only probability, entropy, chance, luck... but nothing serious, time-rewarding, or humane enough to appreciate and love it in the long run.
An actual Developer is someone who prioritizes thinking and solution finding relying on something deterministic and accountable.
All systems based on LLM, ML, or anything that is algorithmically based on feedback system, learning, training, is indeterministic, and hence, always inaccurate, unreliable, and irresponsible systems, by design.
The process of art-working, coding, programming, development, solution finding... that feel of an achievement. This is what I understand, too. There's no achievement in anything AI-driven - it based on luck/moment/probability/chance.
"Oh My God! Please, all Gods, make this AI output the finally correct code! Please!"
Fudge it.
And you also pay for it. You pay and depend on it, on the the luck, for the chance, for the probability someone controls for you over an API or algorithm you don't even know or cannot verify due its "self-training" design, or it being close-sourced.
> ...you're gatekeeping programming... you are not seeing the big picture... you are missing opportunities...
No, sorry, never. I do not agree with that. These "responses" are coming from infants, immature, children, I believe, sorry... from those who could not care less about the development, responsibility, the overall process of the life of us, people, to find solutions, to reach the goals, to treasure achievements, to write our history with actual names of people on papers sign on papers by hand... for what will leave after us, with art, statues, quotes... in the infinite history of the ineffably magnificent world...
Your name should be in the code you write alone or with a team, your commits, solutions. Your work must be acknowledged and kept in the history. You should be always a respectable alive artist, who is responsible for their work. Our history must evolve, be preserved, respected, appreciated, and shine with glory of our achievements with human names in it for the incredibly marvelous future of opportunities, discoveries, love, and purely magnificent marvel.
There's whole space out there, still, and we must add and keep human names in the history cherished.
> Machines should work. People should think. ~ IBM
The price of intelligence is the same. What's being lowered is the standard of living.
I disagree, there is no such thing as artificial intelligence, there is only intelligence.
>When intelligence is seen as a means to an end
Because it is also a means to an end regardless of whatever else it can do. It is a dimension in the problem space of survival.
We as humans are now feeling pressure on our intelligence, whereas us humans have been putting a shitload of pressure on just about every other intelligent creature for the last 100,000 years.
As another commenter said, many of us have viewed our intelligence as a key part of our personhood and how we perceive and interact with the world. But capitalism has found a way to convert that, too, into a purchaseable commodity.
If intelligence is now meaningless and being perceptive is worthless, all that remains is the ugliness of stupid power.
I don't disagree that there are some truly awful people in power in certain places right now, but this statement is ridiculous. Many intelligent and perceptive people are very cruel or foolish.
> all that remains is the ugliness of stupid power
With the current regime, there might be a next level, but not at all an enjoyable one.
AI-generated data might not always be that useful, but at least in this case it obviously is.
> AIDE demonstrates that recursive self-improvement at the harness layer can produce transferable gains in an AI research agent’s research efficiency. During the recursive self-improvement run, the loop accepted seven rewrites, each under a fixed evaluation budget (section 3.2). Under this fixed evaluation budget, gains in optimization capability on AI R&D tasks translate to gains in research efficiency."
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11873
> The Last AI Built by Humans: Toward Genuine Recursive Self-Improvement
That's the issue. No one can really systematize "discovery".
How many "group thinkers", "creatives", "non-group thinkers", "nihilists", "anarchists", "contemplatives" in the last - say, 500 years, 5000 years, whatever - have been occasioned by the fall of an Apple? Or the fall of a branch? Or a leaf? Or what have you?
Why did it spark a new flame in the mind of Newton? Science can't explain. If we could, we'd teach everyone to be that sort of contemplative.
The intern I worked with last year said her graduating class all felt like they were the last "real" graduates. Meaning: the class after her had less credibility in her eyes, having been presumed to have used AI to get past the "pons asinorum"/"bridge of asses".
On the one hand, one really can't remove all of humanity from the economy. Humans are what makes the economy matter, and if you cut them all out, they'll just replace the economy with something else, call it "the economy", and move on. ("Butlerian Jihad" pivot, I suppose.)
On the other hand... I'm reminded of dock workers and the advent of container ships. The only way to handle that was to basically pay those workers a living wage for the rest of their lives to ... not work.
So... we have options, I guess!
[1] In Orson Welles's Time Machine, the eloi were the lazy "child-like" humans not challenged to grow intellectually.There are about five companies who hire people with his background. They all go through boom and bust cycles together. When he graduated they were in a bust cycle and nobody was hiring new graduates, so he found a job in software. He was glad because the pay and working conditions are better, and at the time (a few years ago) it seemed like software engineering was a safe career with lots of employers, which turbine engineering was not.
This comment isn’t trying to be biased any specific way, just trying to be realistic while also saying alternatives exist but would likely be disruptive for better or for worse.
If rich people want to influence politicians, there should be hard caps on money and advertising.
There's nothing wrong in saying too much money is now destroying too much of the good parts of our country. Starting one step at a time is better than trying to build a massive reform that goes no where.
Once money in politics calms down, the next steps should become more obvious as the noise from the Billionaires no longer drown out our attention.
You can have billions in nominal units but it is inflated to worthlessness when resources or labour disappear
What’s to be scared of anyway? Isn’t China a peaceful nation that abides by international law?