The ethics of working after AGI
Issue 046 · April 1, 2024
Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly guide to our (inevitable) transition toward AGI.
I have been thinking a lot about working and hiring in a context where autonomous systems are already capable of replacing so many of our tasks. I would never have considered commissioning an artist weekly to create the newsletter cover image, but thanks to Dall-E and a few of my minutes, each edition can easily be illustrated with an original piece. While the metaphor does not yet extend to all other areas of work, I sense the amount of different capabilities that we are able to up-skill ourselves in, is only going to increase. The only limitation is our time and desire to learn and apply new skills.
In some circles people are betting on when we’ll see the first single-person, AI-augmented company worth $1B. With a handful of employees, MidJourney is possibly the closest match so far, but we can certain that thousands to millions of people are out there pushing the boundary of how much of a force-multiplier the right AI can become. I suspect such companies will be as common as unicorns by the end of the decade.
This week’s issue features a collection of lectures and observations from around the web. If this selection isn’t enough to satiate your curiosity, consider 💬 joining our new WhatsApp group where these and many other links were discussed.
Until next week,
MZ
MZ
Interview with Daniela Amodei
This is a superb interview with Daniela Amodei of Anthropic. Lots of insight into their Claude model family.
Many customers have told us part of the appeal of Claude is that Claude feels more human... it really feels like talking to a trusted person versus talking to a robot that was trained to sound like a human.
Interview with Carl Shulman
An incredibly well-informed interview with Carl Shulman from the Future Humanity Institute about the intelligence explosion we are already experiencing.
SXSW presentation about the future of work
AI powered workspaces and teams are an incredibly recurring theme. I find the speakers' (and previously Kurzweil's) example of "30 exponential steps" senseless. There are so many better ways of explaining exponential growth, like the chessboard and rice parable.
The future does not fit the containers of the past.
AI Agentic Workflows
Agentic reasoning design patterns are going to be important...I expect that the set of tasks AI could do will expand dramatically this year because of agentic workflows...the path to AGI feels like a journey rather than a destination but I think this type of agent workflows could help us take a small step forward on this very long journey.
Karpathy is always worth a listen
I want the ecosystem to be healthy I want it to be thriving I want it to be like a coral reef of a lot of cool exciting startups and all the nukes and crannies of the economy and I want the whole thing to be like this boiling soup of cool stuff.
Around the web:
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This is a great use of inline AI interactions from the NYTimes: you answer a couple of questions to estimate your political leaning with AI).
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This is really nice: a visual essay explaining how image models are trained (on image models).
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🏅 Forwarding this issue to colleagues and friends.
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🎯 Commenting with your favorite talks and thinkers.
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