A human-led firm typically involves emotional decision-making, personal relationships, and a degree of unpredictability, whereas a fully automated firm, led by an AI CEO, would be driven by data, algorithms, and optimization.
Key Implications
This fundamental difference can impact areas such as innovation, risk management, and customer interaction, with automated firms potentially exceling in efficiency and scalability, but potentially lacking in creativity and empathy.
Balancing Human and Automated Elements
A hybrid approach, combining the strengths of human intuition and AI-driven insights, might offer the best of both worlds, allowing organizations to leverage the benefits of automation while maintaining the unique value of human leadership.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Human vs Automated Firms
A human-led firm typically involves emotional decision-making, personal relationships, and a degree of unpredictability, whereas a fully automated firm, led by an AI CEO, would be driven by data, algorithms, and optimization.
Key Implications
This fundamental difference can impact areas such as innovation, risk management, and customer interaction, with automated firms potentially exceling in efficiency and scalability, but potentially lacking in creativity and empathy.
Balancing Human and Automated Elements
A hybrid approach, combining the strengths of human intuition and AI-driven insights, might offer the best of both worlds, allowing organizations to leverage the benefits of automation while maintaining the unique value of human leadership.
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.