The more valuable the decisions, the more compute you'll want to throw at them. A single strategic insight from mega-Sundar could be worth billions. An overlooked risk could cost tens of billions. However many billions Google should optimally spend on inference for mega-Sundar, it's certainly more than one.
Distillation
What might distilled copies of AI Sundar (or AI Jeff) be like? Obviously, it makes sense for them to be highly specialized, especially when you can amortize the cost of that domain specific knowledge across all copies. You can give each distilled data center operator a deep technical understanding of every component in the cluster, for example.
I suspect you’ll see a lot of specialization in function, tacit knowledge, and complex skills, because they seem expensive to sustain in terms of parameter count. But I think the different models might share a lot more factual knowledge than you might expect. It’s true that plumber-GPT doesn’t need to know much about the standard model in physics, nor does physicist-GPT need to know why the drain is leaking. But the cost of storing raw information is so unbelievably cheap (and it’s only decreasing) that Llama-7B already knows more about the standard model and leaky drains than any non-expert.
If human-level intelligence is more than 1 trillion parameters, is it so much of an imposition to keep around what will, at the limit, be much less than 7 billion parameters to have most known facts right in your model? (Another helpful data point here is that “Good and Featured” Wikitext is less than 5 MB. I don’t see why all future models—except the esoteric ones, the digital equivalent of tardigrades—wouldn’t at least have Wikitext down.
This evolvability is also the key difference between AI and human firms. As Gwern points out, human firms simply cannot replicate themselves effectively - they're made of people, not code that can be copied. They can't clone their culture, their institutional knowledge, or their operational excellence. AI firms can7.
If you think human Elon is especially gifted at creating hardware companies, you simply can’t spin up 100 Elons, have them each take on a different vertical, and give them each $100 million in seed money. As much of a micromanager as Elon might be, he’s still limited by his single human form. But AI Elon can have copies of himself design the batteries, be the car mechanic at the dealership, and so on. And if Elon isn’t the best person for the job, the person who is can also be replicated, to create the template for a new descendant organization.