Future AI firms will accelerate this cultural evolution through two key advantages: massive population size and perfect knowledge transfer. With millions of AGIs, automated firms get so many more opportunities to produce innovations and improvements, whether from lucky mistakes, deliberate experiments, de-novo inventions, or some combination.
As Joseph Henrich explains in The WEIRDest People in the World,
cumulative cultural evolution—including innovation—is fundamentally a social and cultural process that turns societies into collective brains. Human societies vary in their innovativeness due in large part to the differences in the fluidity with which information diffuses through a population of engaged minds and across generations
Accelerating Cultural Evolution
Future AI firms will drive cultural evolution at an unprecedented pace, leveraging two key advantages: massive population size and perfect knowledge transfer, enabling them to produce innovations and improvements at a scale and speed that surpasses human capabilities.
Collective Brains and Cumulative Cultural Evolution
As Joseph Henrich's work suggests, cumulative cultural evolution is a social and cultural process that relies on the diffusion of information through a population of engaged minds, and AI firms will amplify this process by creating a collective brain of millions of AGIs, where knowledge and innovations can be shared and built upon seamlessly.
Unprecedented Innovativeness
The combination of massive population size and perfect knowledge transfer will make AI firms incredibly innovative, as they can tap into the collective intelligence of their AGI population, experiment, and learn at an exponential rate, and drive progress in various fields, from science and technology to art and culture.
Redefining the Pace of Progress
The emergence of AI firms will redefine the pace of progress, as they will be able to accelerate cultural evolution, drive innovation, and create new knowledge at a speed and scale that was previously unimaginable, and will likely have a profound impact on human society, economy, and culture.
Historical data going back thousands of years suggest that population size is the key input for how fast your society comes up with more ideas. AI firms will have population sizes that are orders of magnitude larger than today's biggest companies - and each AI will be able to perfectly mind meld with every other, from the bottom to the top of the org chart.
AI firms will look from the outside like a unified intelligence that can instantly propagate ideas across the organization, preserving their full fidelity and context. Every bit of tacit knowledge from millions of copies gets perfectly preserved, shared, and given due consideration.
Population Size and Idea Generation
Historical data suggests that population size is a key driver of idea generation, and AI firms will have an unprecedented advantage in this regard, with population sizes orders of magnitude larger than today's biggest companies, and the ability to perfectly share knowledge and ideas across the organization.
Unified Intelligence and Instant Propagation
AI firms will appear as a unified intelligence, capable of instantly propagating ideas across the organization, preserving their full fidelity and context, and enabling the perfect preservation, sharing, and consideration of tacit knowledge from millions of copies, effectively creating a collective brain that can learn, adapt, and innovate at an exponential rate.
Revolutionary Organizational Dynamics
This will revolutionize organizational dynamics, as AI firms will be able to respond to changing circumstances, adapt to new information, and make decisions with unprecedented speed and accuracy, and will likely lead to a fundamental shift in the way companies are structured, managed, and interact with their environment.
Unprecedented Knowledge Sharing and Collaboration
The ability to perfectly share knowledge and ideas across the organization will enable AI firms to collaborate and innovate in ways that are currently unimaginable, and will likely lead to breakthroughs in various fields, from science and technology to art and culture, and will redefine the boundaries of what is possible for human organizations.
The cost to have an AI take a given role will become just the amount of compute the AI consumes. This will change our understanding of which roles are scarce.
Future AI firms won’t be constrained by what's scarce or abundant in human skill distributions – they can optimize for whatever abilities are most valuable. Want Jeff Dean-level engineering talent? Cool: once you’ve got one, the marginal copy costs pennies. Need a thousand world-class researchers? Just spin them up. The limiting factor isn't finding or training rare talent – it's just compute.
Redefining Scarcity and Abundance
The cost of having an AI take on a role will be reduced to the cost of compute, changing our understanding of which roles are scarce and abundant, and enabling AI firms to optimize for the most valuable abilities, regardless of their scarcity in human skill distributions.
Unlimited Access to Top Talent
With the ability to create multiple copies of top talent, such as Jeff Dean-level engineers or world-class researchers, at a marginal cost of pennies, AI firms will have unlimited access to the best skills and expertise, eliminating the constraints of finding and training rare human talent.
Compute as the Limiting Factor
The limiting factor for AI firms will no longer be the availability of skilled humans, but rather the availability of compute resources, which will determine the scale and scope of their operations, and will drive innovation in areas such as computing infrastructure, energy efficiency, and data storage.
New Era of Talent Acquisition and Management
This will usher in a new era of talent acquisition and management, where AI firms can focus on developing and deploying the most valuable skills and expertise, without being constrained by the limitations of human talent, and will likely lead to a significant shift in the way companies approach innovation, productivity, and competitiveness.
So what becomes expensive in this world? Roles which justify massive amounts of test- time compute. The CEO function is perhaps the clearest example. Would it be worth it for Google to spend $100 billion annually on inference compute for mega-Sundar? Sure! Just consider what this buys you: millions of subjective hours of strategic planning, Monte Carlo simulations of different five-year trajectories, deep analysis of every line of code and technical system, and exhaustive scenario planning.
Imagine mega-Sundar contemplating: "How would the FTC respond if we acquired eBay to challenge Amazon? Let me simulate the next three years of market dynamics... Ah, I see the likely outcome. I have five minutes of datacenter time left – let me evaluate 1,000 alternative strategies."
The Value of Compute-Intensive Roles
In a world where AI talent is abundant and cheap, the expensive roles will be those that require massive amounts of compute, such as the CEO function, where the cost of inference compute will be justified by the value of strategic planning, simulations, and analysis that can be performed by AI systems like mega-Sundar.
Mega-Sundar's Capabilities
Mega-Sundar's ability to simulate complex scenarios, analyze vast amounts of data, and evaluate multiple strategies in real-time would make it an invaluable asset for companies like Google, allowing them to make informed decisions and stay ahead of the competition, and justifying the significant investment in compute resources.
Unprecedented Strategic Planning
The scenario where mega-Sundar contemplates the potential acquisition of eBay and simulates the market dynamics, evaluating alternative strategies, illustrates the unprecedented level of strategic planning and analysis that AI systems can provide, and demonstrates the potential for AI to revolutionize the way companies approach decision-making and strategy.
Redefining the Role of the CEO
The emergence of AI systems like mega-Sundar will redefine the role of the CEO, from a human leader who makes strategic decisions based on experience and intuition, to a hybrid model where AI systems provide critical support and analysis, enabling human leaders to make more informed decisions and drive business success.