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THE INTELLIGENCE AGE

September 23, 2024

In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have
seemed like magic to our grandparents.

This phenomenon is not new, but it will be newly accelerated. People have become
dramatically more capable over time; we can already accomplish things now that
our predecessors would have believed to be impossible.

We are more capable not because of genetic change, but because we benefit from
the infrastructure of society being way smarter and more capable than any one of
us; in an important sense, society itself is a form of advanced intelligence.
Our grandparents – and the generations that came before them – built and
achieved great things. They contributed to the scaffolding of human progress
that we all benefit from. AI will give people tools to solve hard problems and
help us add new struts to that scaffolding that we couldn’t have figured out on
our own. The story of progress will continue, and our children will be able to
do things we can’t.

It won’t happen all at once, but we’ll soon be able to work with AI that helps
us accomplish much more than we ever could without AI; eventually we can each
have a personal AI team, full of virtual experts in different areas, working
together to create almost anything we can imagine. Our children will have
virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any
language, and at whatever pace they need. We can imagine similar ideas for
better healthcare, the ability to create any kind of software someone can
imagine, and much more.

With these new abilities, we can have shared prosperity to a degree that seems
unimaginable today; in the future, everyone’s lives can be better than anyone’s
life is now. Prosperity alone doesn’t necessarily make people happy – there are
plenty of miserable rich people – but it would meaningfully improve the lives of
people around the world.

Here is one narrow way to look at human history: after thousands of years of
compounding scientific discovery and technological progress, we have figured out
how to melt sand, add some impurities, arrange it with astonishing precision at
extraordinarily tiny scale into computer chips, run energy through it, and end
up with systems capable of creating increasingly capable artificial
intelligence.

This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far.
It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!);
it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there.

How did we get to the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity?

In three words: deep learning worked.

In 15 words: deep learning worked, got predictably better with scale, and we
dedicated increasing resources to it.

That’s really it; humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly
learn any distribution of data (or really, the underlying “rules” that produce
any distribution of data). To a shocking degree of precision, the more compute
and data available, the better it gets at helping people solve hard problems. I
find that no matter how much time I spend thinking about this, I can never
really internalize how consequential it is.

There are a lot of details we still have to figure out, but it’s a mistake to
get distracted by any particular challenge. Deep learning works, and we will
solve the remaining problems. We can say a lot of things about what may happen
next, but the main one is that AI is going to get better with scale, and that
will lead to meaningful improvements to the lives of people around the world.

AI models will soon serve as autonomous personal assistants who carry out
specific tasks on our behalf like coordinating medical care on your behalf. At
some point further down the road, AI systems are going to get so good that they
help us make better next-generation systems and make scientific progress across
the board.

Technology brought us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age and then to the
Industrial Age. From here, the path to the Intelligence Age is paved with
compute, energy, and human will.

If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible, we need to
drive down the cost of compute and make it abundant (which requires lots of
energy and chips). If we don’t build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very
limited resource that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for
rich people.

We need to act wisely but with conviction. The dawn of the Intelligence Age is a
momentous development with very complex and extremely high-stakes challenges. It
will not be an entirely positive story, but the upside is so tremendous that we
owe it to ourselves, and the future, to figure out how to navigate the risks in
front of us.

I believe the future is going to be so bright that no one can do it justice by
trying to write about it now; a defining characteristic of the Intelligence Age
will be massive prosperity.

Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs – fixing the climate,
establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics – will
eventually become commonplace. With nearly-limitless intelligence and abundant
energy – the ability to generate great ideas, and the ability to make them
happen – we can do quite a lot.

As we have seen with other technologies, there will also be downsides, and we
need to start working now to maximize AI’s benefits while minimizing its harms.
As one example, we expect that this technology can cause a significant change in
labor markets (good and bad) in the coming years, but most jobs will change more
slowly than most people think, and I have no fear that we’ll run out of things
to do (even if they don’t look like “real jobs” to us today). People have an
innate desire to create and to be useful to each other, and AI will allow us to
amplify our own abilities like never before. As a society, we will be back in an
expanding world, and we can again focus on playing positive-sum games.

Many of the jobs we do today would have looked like trifling wastes of time to
people a few hundred years ago, but nobody is looking back at the past, wishing
they were a lamplighter. If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would
think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable. And if we could
fast-forward a hundred years from today, the prosperity all around us would feel
just as unimaginable.