AGI is Still 30 Years Away — Ege Erdil & Tamay Besiroglu
Episode publishedPodcast: Dwarkesh PodcastDwarkesh Podcast
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Today, I'm chatting with Tame Beseroglu and Ege Erdo. They were previously running Epoch AI and are now, launching Mechanize, which is a company dedicated to automating all work. One of the interesting points you made recently, Tome, is that the whole idea of the intelligence explosion is mistaken or misleading. Why don't you explain what you were talking about there?
Yeah. I think it's not a very useful concept. It's kind of like calling the industrial revolution a horsepower explosion. Like, sure, during the industrial revolution, we saw this drastic acceleration in raw physical power, but there are many other things that were maybe equally important in explaining the acceleration of growth and technological change that we saw during the industrial revolution.
What is the way to characterize the broader set of things that the horsepower perspective would miss about the industrial revolution?
So I think in the case of the industrial revolution, it was a bunch of these complementary changes to many different sectors in the economy. So you had agriculture, you had transportation, you had law and finance, you had urbanization and moving from rural areas into into cities. There were just many different innovations that kind of, you know, happened simultaneously that gave rise to this, change in the the way of economically organizing our society. It wasn't just that we had more horsepower. That I mean, that was part of it, but that's not the kind of central thing to focus on when thinki
Yeah. I wanna better understand how you think about that broader transformation. Before we do, the other really interesting part of your worldview is that you have longer timelines to get to AGI than most of the people in San Francisco who think about AI. When do you expect a drop in remote worker replacement?
Yeah. Maybe for me, that would be around, like, 2045 or Wow.
Wait. And you?
I'm a little bit more bullish. I mean, it depends what you mean by drop in remote worker and whether it's able to do, like, literally everything that can be done remotely or do most things. I'm
saying literally everything.
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