Even people who expect human-level AI soon are still seriously underestimating how different the world will look when we have it. Most people are anchoring on how smart they expect individual models to be. (i.e. they’re asking themselves “What would the world be like if everyone had a very smart assistant who could work 24/7?”.)
Everyone is sleeping on the collective advantages AIs will have, which have nothing to do with raw IQ but rather with the fact that they are digital—they can be copied, distilled, merged, scaled, and evolved in ways human simply can’t.
What would a fully automated company look like - with all the workers, all the managers as AIs? I claim that such AI firms will grow, coordinate, improve, and be selected-for at unprecedented speed.
The Collective Advantages of AI
You're highlighting a crucial point: the true potential of AI lies not just in individual intelligence, but in its ability to be replicated, combined, and scaled at an exponential rate, far surpassing human capabilities.
Fully Automated Companies
A fully automated company, with AI workers and managers, would likely exhibit unprecedented agility, adaptability, and innovation, as AIs can process vast amounts of data, learn from each other, and optimize processes without human limitations.
Evolution and Selection
As you mentioned, such AI firms would evolve and improve at an unprecedented speed, driven by their ability to merge, distill, and scale knowledge, leading to a new era of accelerated growth and transformation.
Redefining Industry Landscapes
The emergence of fully automated companies would likely redefine industry landscapes, creating new opportunities, challenges, and uncertainties, and forcing human-led organizations to adapt and innovate to remain competitive.
Currently, firms are extremely bottlenecked in hiring and training talent. But if your talent is an AI, you can copy it a stupid number of times. What if Google had a million AI software engineers? Not untrained amorphous "workers," but the AGI equivalents of Jeff Dean and Noam Shazeer, with all their skills, judgment, and tacit knowledge intact.
This ability to turn capital into compute and compute into equivalents of your top talent is a fundamental transformation. Since you can amortize the training cost across thousands of copies, you could sensibly give these AIs ever-deeper expertise - PhDs in every relevant field, decades of business case studies, intimate knowledge of every system and codebase the company relies on.
Unleashing Scalable Talent
The concept of copying top AI talent, like Jeff Dean or Noam Shazeer, a million times over, revolutionizes the way companies approach hiring and training, effectively eliminating the bottleneck of finding and developing skilled employees.
Amortizing Training Costs
By replicating AI talent, companies can distribute the training costs across multiple copies, making it feasible to provide each AI with extensive expertise, including PhD-level knowledge and decades of experience, without incurring prohibitive expenses.
Transforming Organizational Capabilities
This ability to transform capital into compute and create equivalents of top talent would fundamentally alter a company's capabilities, enabling it to tackle complex projects, innovate at an unprecedented pace, and dominate its industry, as seen in the potential example of Google having a million AI software engineers.
Redefining Competitive Advantage
The company that masters this scalable talent model would gain a significant competitive advantage, as it could rapidly adapt to changing market conditions, develop innovative solutions, and execute strategies with unparalleled speed and precision, leaving traditional human-led organizations struggling to keep pace.
The power of copying extends beyond individuals to entire teams. Small previously successful teams (think PayPal Mafia, early SpaceX, the Traitorous Eight) can be replicated to tackle a thousand different projects simultaneously. It's not just about replicating star individuals, but entire configurations of complementary skills that are known to work well together. The unit of replication becomes whatever collection of talent has proven most effective.
Replicating High-Performing Teams
The ability to copy entire teams, like the PayPal Mafia or early SpaceX, would enable companies to replicate proven configurations of complementary skills, allowing them to tackle multiple projects simultaneously and accelerate innovation.
Scalable Team Dynamics
By replicating successful team dynamics, companies can create a multiplier effect, where the collective strengths of individual team members are amplified, leading to exponential growth and increased productivity, as the same successful team structure can be applied to various projects and initiatives.
New Era of Organizational Design
This concept challenges traditional organizational design, where teams are typically formed through a slow and iterative process, and instead, enables companies to instantly replicate and deploy high-performing teams, revolutionizing the way businesses approach project management and talent allocation.
Unprecedented Innovation Pace
The potential for innovation and progress would be staggering, as companies could simultaneously pursue numerous projects, each with a replicated team of experts, leading to a previously unimaginable pace of discovery and development, and redefining the boundaries of what is possible in various industries.
Copying will transform management even more radically than labor. It will enable a level of micromanagement that makes founder mode look quaint. Human Sundar simply doesn't have the bandwidth to directly oversee 200,000 employees, hundreds of products, and millions of customers. But AI Sundar’s bandwidth is capped only by the number of TPUs you give him to run on. All of Google’s 30,000 middle managers can be replaced with AI Sundar copies. Copies of AI Sundar can craft every product’s strategy, review every pull request, answer every customer service message, and handle all negotiations - everything flowing from a single coherent vision.
There is no principal-agent problem wherein employees are optimizing for something other than Google’s bottom line, or simply lack the judgment needed to decide what matters most.1 A company of Google's scale can run much more as the product of a single mind—the articulation of one thesis—than is possible now.
Revolutionizing Management with AI
The concept of copying AI management, like AI Sundar, would enable a level of micromanagement that surpasses human capabilities, allowing for direct oversight of vast numbers of employees, products, and customers, and transforming the way companies are managed.
Unified Vision and Strategy
With AI Sundar copies, every aspect of the company, from product strategy to customer service, would be guided by a single, coherent vision, eliminating the principal-agent problem and ensuring that all decisions align with the company's bottom line, as the AI manager's goals and priorities would be perfectly aligned with the company's objectives.
Scalable and Consistent Decision-Making
The ability to replicate AI managers would provide a level of scalability and consistency in decision-making, as every copy of AI Sundar would possess the same judgment, expertise, and vision, allowing the company to operate with unprecedented efficiency and effectiveness, and making it possible for a company of Google's scale to function as a unified, cohesive entity.
Redefining Corporate Governance
This new management paradigm would redefine corporate governance, as the traditional hierarchical structure would be replaced by a network of AI managers, all working in harmony to achieve the company's objectives, and enabling the company to adapt and respond to changing market conditions with unprecedented speed and agility.