Anton Leicht on AI deployment, economic disruption and risk
Original excerpt
we have a big lag in terms of deploying even the current level of capabilities to the economy. And I think if we switched all the compute that exists in the West right now to only inference, we'd find economic, productive applications for all the models that would allow us to justify the investment on all the frontier models
Context
How about the stock market? I wanted to do one follow-up on that. My theory right now is that a pause wouldn't actually be that bad for the stock market, because the models are smart enough that demand isn't really limited by their capability, but by human ability to deploy them effectively. So it doesn't really matter if they succeed 10% of the time or 30% of the time on Millennium Prize problems — it's much more like, what can Bob in accounting do to get two people's worth of work done as one person? What do you think? I think the valuations of the companies — both the non-IPO companies and the publicly listed companies that are in the AI supply chain — probably rest on us doing more than that. They're probably not entirely AGI-pilled, but I do think they expect a per-GPU inference price, or whatever that is, that's a lot higher than what would make sense for Bob from accounting to pay for even Fable 5.1. If you want to make sense of the valuations, and if you want to make sense of the scale of the build-out, the shape of contract and the shape of demand you're expecting is more like millions and millions of dollars in R&D acceleration contracts with pharma and material science and so on, where they can make major contributions and help you find extremely profitable new drugs — that kind of thing. You're probably also expecting further internal uplift and actually competitively priced automated AI R&D uses — coding agents that are able to ask for much, much higher prices.
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