> Nor is it possible to imagine a system where a few mega companies are the only providers of intelligence

Why not? This seems to be exactly where we're headed right now, and the current administration seems to be perfectly fine with that trend.

If you follow the current logic of AI proponents, you get essentially:

(1) Almost all white-collar jobs will be done better or at least faster by AI.

(2) The "repugnant conclusion": AI gets better if and only if you throw more compute and training data at it. The improvements of all other approaches will be tiny in comparison.

(3) The amount of capital needed to play the "more compute/more training data" game is already insanely high and will only grow further. So only the largest megacorps will be even able to take part in the competition.

If you combine (1) with (3), this means that, over time, the economic choice for almost any white-collar job would be to outsource it to the data centers of the few remaining megacorps.

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brap 4 days ago | parent [-]

I find it extremely hard to believe that ASI will still require enormous investments in a post-ASI world.

The initial investment? Likely. But there have to be more efficient ways to build intelligence, and ASI will figure it out.

It did not take trillions of dollars to produce you and I.

	▲	walleeee 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> It did not take trillions of dollars to produce you and I. Indeed, an alien ethnographer might be forgiven for boggling at the speed and enthusiasm with which we are trading a wealth of the most advanced technology in the known universe for a primitive, wasteful, fragile facsimile of it.
	▲	layer8 4 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		The efficient ways (biotech?) are still likely to require massive investments, maybe not unlike chip fabs that cost billions. And then IP and patents come in.
	▲	xg15 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Maybe in a few decades or so, but medium-term, there seems to be a race of who can built the largest data centers. https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-ai-bubble-is-so-big-...