Comment by ben_w

6 months ago

> If I, for instance, tell my wife I can improve our income by 3x or 1000x but I don't really know, there's no planning that can be done and I'll probably have to sleep on the couch until I figure out what the hell I'm doing.

For most people, even a mere 3x in the next 5 years is huge, it's 25% per year growth.

3x in 5 years is a reasonable low-ball for hardware improvements alone. Caveat: top-end silicon is now being treated as a strategic asset, so there may be wars over it, driving up prices and/or limiting progress, even on the 5-year horizon.

I'm unclear why your metaphor would have you sleeping on the sofa: If tonight you produce a business idea for which you can be 2σ-confident that it will give you an income 5 years from now in the range [3…1000]x, you can likely get a loan for a substantially bigger house tomorrow than you were able to get yesterday; in the UK that's a change slightly larger than going from the median average full-time salary to the standard member of parliament salary.

(The reason behind this, observed lowering of compute costs, has been used even decades ago to delay investment in compute until the compute was cheaper).

The arguments I've seen elsewhere for order-of-10,000x* cost improvements (which is a proxy for efficiency and speed if not IQ) is based on various different observations cost reductions** since ChatGPT came out — personally, I doubt that the high end of that would come to pass, my guess is those all represent low-hanging fruit that can't be picked twice, but even then I would still expect there to be some opportunity for further gains.

* The original statement had one more digit in it than yours, but this doesn't make much difference to the argument either way