YouSaid · the spoken record

Noah Smith

lines on the record: 110
first: 2025-08-04
most recent: 2025-08-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We take UBI Yeah, I mean, sure. But then again, we typically do not see the first best, most efficient political solution implemented for things like redistribution. In the real world, redistribution happens via things like the minimum wage or like letting the AMA decide how many doctors there's going to be. So redistribution in the real world is not always the most efficient thing. So I'm just saying that comparative advantage, if you're talking about will humans actually continue to get high paid work, yes or no, it depends on political decisions that may depends on physical constraints that will happen.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But at that point, the comparative Marigen, human labor has nothing to do with this. The only reason the system works is that you are basically transferring. You've come up with a sort of like intricate way to transfer resources to humans. This resource is for you. You have this land and therefore you can survive. And this is just like an inefficient way to allocate resources to humans. It's true.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is, but that comes from the common resource consumption. So if basically all of the land and energy that could be used to feed and clothe and shelter humans gets appropriated by H100s, then that is the case. However, if you pass a law that says this land is reserved for growing human food, if we actually were to just pass a simple law saying that you have to use these resources, these resources reserved for humans.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You'll just keep expanding that supply of compute until basically 800 plus depreciation plus running cost is the same as an extra year of labor. And in that world, that's much lower than human subsistence. So comparative advantage is totally consistent with human wages being below subsistence.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm saying, I don't know if there is. The reason I find that implausible is that I think that will be true in the short term because right now there's 10 million H100 equivalents in the world. In a couple of years, it might be 100 million. Like 800 has the same amount of flops as a human brain. So theoretically, they're as good as a brain if you had the right algorithm. So there's a lower population of AIs, even if you had AGI right now than humans. But the key difference is that in the long run, you can just keep increasing the supply of compute or of robots. And so if it is the case, so if an A100 costs a couple thousand dollars a year to run, but the value of an extra year of intellectual worth is still like $100,000. So you're like, look, we've saturated all the H100s and we're going to pay a few hundred thousand dollars because there's still so much intellectual work to do. In that world, the return on buying another H100, like an H100 costs $40,000, just like in a year that H100 will pay you over $200% return, right?”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, because there's a Mark Andreessen specific aggregate constraint on Mark Andreessen's, there is only one of him. So he hasn't taken all the secretary's typist jobs, but because he has better things to do. And so if there's some sort of AI-specific research constraint that hits, then humans could have. Now, I'm not saying there will be, and I'm not saying there won't be. I'm saying I don't know if there is.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think humans may have high-in guns. Because of comparative advantage. The key here is if there's some AI specific resource constraint that doesn't apply to humans, then comparative advantage law takes over and then humans get high paying jobs, even though AI would be better at any specific thing than human because there's some sort of aggregate constraint. The example I always use, of course, is Mark Andreessen, who is the fastest typist I have ever seen in my life and yet does not do his own typing.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My suspicion is that humans have just adapted to so much. Like agricultural revolution, industrial revolution, the growth of states, like once in a while, like a communist or fascist or give regime will come around or something. The idea that being free and having millions of dollars is the thing that finally gets us. I'm just suspicious By the way, do we not disagree about the thing I'm saying once we get AGI, humans will not have high-paying jobs? Do we disagree about this?”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are you dubious of the trope that labor provides meaning and if people don't have a clear sense for labor, then it will be very difficult for them to obtain alternative sources of meaning? Or is that kind of a capitalist sort of stroke that isn't necessarily true?”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sovereign offense generally have a bad frack record. There's some exceptions that have managed to use their wealth while Norway or Alaska, but they're just like these political economy problems that come up. When there's this tight connection between the investment, which should theoretically be just highest rate of return and politicians. So I don't have a strong alternative. Ideally, you just let the market decide how the investment should happen. And then you can just take a tax. But then exactly where does that tax happen? I haven't thought it through. Are you dubious of this? Yeah, I wouldn't want the government influencing were that investment happens, but I want the government taking a significant share of the returns of that investment.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We use that money to buy shares in the things that those people have so they get their money back because we're buying the shares back from them. Okay. So it's okay. And then we hire them. Because then what we do is we hire a number of firms, including A16Z, and pay them 220 or whatever, to manage the investment of AI stuff on behalf of the humans, but then the humans become broad-based sort of index fund shareholders or shareholders and whatever you guys choose to invest in, and then you take a cut. And this could be the future economy. This is what my PhD advisor, Miles Kimball, has suggested. This is what the socialist Matt Bruning has suggested. And this is what Alaska actually does with oil.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the hopeful case here is the way our society currently treats retirees and old people who are not generating any economic value anymore. And if you just look at like the percent of your paycheck that's basically being transferred to old people, it's like, I don't know, 25% or something. And you're willing to do this because they have a lot of political power. They've used that political power in order to lock in these advantages. They're not like so overwhelming. You're like, I'm going to go to like Costa Rica instead. You're like, okay, I had to pay this money. I had to pay this concession. I'll do it. And hopefully humans could be in a similar position to this massive AI economy that old people today have in today's economy.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Capital income is distributed highly unevenly. It's more distributed much more unevenly than labor income, but it's still distributed reasonably broadly. Like I have capital income, you have capital income. So at that point, we have just an extremely unequal society where owners get everything and then workers get nothing. And then so we have to figure out what to do about that.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think more plausible is AIs will be integrated through all the firms in the economy. A firm can have property. Firms will be largely run by AIs, even though there's nominally a human board of directors. And it might not even be nominal, right? Like maybe the AIs are aligned in genuinely give the board of directors an accurate summary of what's happening, but day-to-day are being run by AIs, and firms can have property rights, firms can demand things.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI companies expect to reap benefits from consumers like you and me? Or to what extent is it that? And to what extent is it Sam Altman feels like doing some crazy stuff and Sam Altman's just godlike richer than everybody else? And so Sam Altman is actually consuming when he builds those data centers. He is building those data centers so that he can indulge his godlike whims.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I guess my point here is as long as AI still doesn't have property rights and it's humans making all the economic decisions, be it Sam Altman and Elon Musk or you and me, then at that point like That really matters for what gets done because if we're talking about the money needed to build all these massive data centers, which currently it's a lot of money. It's a ton of money required to build these data centers. And that money need will not go away. We can't just say, oh, cost goes to zero because we can say unit cost goes to zero, but total cost doesn't go to zero, nor has it. It has increased. The total spend on data centers has increased. And I think everyone expects it to increase for the foreseeable future. The question is, is that money being spent because”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is. But in terms of And so, by the way, I would like to say that I am a paperclip maximizer. I am the real paperclip maximizer. I want to maximize rabbits. In the galaxy. I want to turn the entire galaxy into fluffy rabbit. That's my goal. And so my goal with AGI is to enlist the AGIs to help me in this goal. But then to align them toward rabbit. But anyway.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honestly, I don't have like a super strong opinion, but I think that's plausible. But independent of that, I'm like, okay, even if that demand doesn't exist, just like the things you can do with a new frontier of technology, as long as one person wants it, there's so much room to do things. Space colonization is an obvious example. That's a lot of money. Right. There's obvious demand for the things that I will be able to produce, right? Like one of the things that I can produce is colonize the galaxy.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm just trying to get I think you're making two different points, and they're getting wrapped into one. So there's one about do you expect it to be the case that the robot overlord world happens? And I'm saying, no, actually, even without, first of all, I expect redistribution to happen. I hope it happens. But even if it doesn't, and I don't think it'll happen because people like corporations wanted a redistribution to happen, I think it would be good to happen for independent reasons, but I don't buy this argument that the corporations would be like, we need somebody to buy our AI, therefore we need to give the money to the organer consumer.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. I'm just trying to get this straight in my head of what this economy looks like, and I'm seeing a picture of the trillions of dollars needed to build out all these data centers will be done not for profit, not to make money from a consumer economy for the creators of the AI, but to satisfy the whims of a few robot lords to colonize the galaxy.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But again, I don't think you'll be producing it for them. I think you'll be producing it for whoever does have stuff in the world. Somebody will have stuff. Maybe it's the AIs, maybe it's Sam Altman. You're producing it for whoever has the capability to buy your stuff. And will they want AI? And I'm just saying AI can do so many things, least of which is like colonizing the galaxy. People are willing to pay a lot of stuff.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why would I invest all this money into AI producing stuff? Why would I just invest the massive hundreds and billions and trillions and whatever of dollars into producing stuff for people who are all going to be out of a job and won't be able to buy this?”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I disagree. I would prefer it to be the case that even as a libertarian, I would prefer for significant amounts of redistribution in this world because the libertarian argument doesn't make sense if there's no way you could physically pick yourself up by the bootstraps. Your labor is not worth anything, or your labor is worth less in subsistence calories or whatever, which is the more relevant thing. But I don't think this is analogous to the situation in China. I think what's happening in China is more due to the fact that you have the system of financial repression, which redistributes money and also currency manipulation, which basically redistributes ordinary people's money to basically producing one EV maker in every single province. So it is the market distortion that the government is creating that causes overproduction. We can go into what the analogous thing in the EI case looks like, but I think if there isn't some market distortion, I just think people will use AI where it has the highest rate of return. If it's not space colonization, there will be longevity drugs or whatever.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It seems like there will be corporate pressure on the government to do something to redistribute purchasing power so that they don't compete their profits to negative and so they have some reason to create more economic activity so they can take a slice of it, which is essentially what happened in the early 20th century.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To stay financially float, even though it's the best car company in the world because the Chinese government has paid a million other car companies to compete with BUID. And so you overproduce. So you have this overproduction. So the solution was to expand consumption. This is the solution people are recommending for China now to expand consumption so that you can refloat the profit margins of all these companies and have them continuous companies. And so the idea is if AI is producing all this stuff, but it's overproducing services, it's overproducing whatever AI can produce. And the profits from this go negative, that makes the GDP contribution go to zero. And basically OpenAI and Anthropic and XAI and whatever will just be sitting there saying, why am I doing this again? Why am I? No one's buying this shit. And so at that point.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I guess I'm just thinking about this is a thing that economists really struggled with in the early 20th century. It's this idea that we had this capacity to expand production, expand production, expand production, and then the thing is that companies competed their profits to zero and the profits crash and nobody wanted to expand production anymore because they weren't making any profit. We're seeing this happen again in China right now with overproduction. We're seeing BYD having to take loans from its suppliers”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In many cases, it's hard to ascribe how much economic growth there has been over a very long period of time. For example, if you're comparing the basket of goods that we can produce as an economy today versus 500 years ago, it's not clear how you compare, we have antibiotics today. I wouldn't want to go back 500 years for any amount of money because they don't have antibiotics and I might die and it'll just suck. So there's actually no amount of money to live in 1500 that we would rather have than live today. And so if we have those quality of goods for normal people, just like you can live forever, you have euphoria drugs, whatever. These are things we can imagine now. Hopefully will be even more compelling than that. Then it's easy to imagine like, okay, it makes sense why this stuff is worth way more than the stuff that the world economy can pursue for even for normal people today.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the economy will be incredibly different from what it was in the past. I'm not saying this is like the modal world. There's a couple of reasons why this might not end up happening. One is even if your labor is not worth that much, the property you own is potentially worth a lot, right? If you own the S&P 500 and there's been explosive growth, you're like a multi-multi-millionaire or the land you have is like worth a lot. AI can make such a good use of that land to build the space probes, assuming that our system of property rights continues into this regime. And second, so I mean,”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The ones he's like Maybe. The thing is that it's a very weird world. It doesn't look like the kind of economy we've ever had. And we created the notion of GDP to represent people exchanging money for goods and services, people like basically exchanging their labor for goods, exchanging the value of their labor for goods and services. That's at a fundamental level. That's what GDP is. We're envisioning a radical shift of what GDP means to a sort of Internal pricing that a few overlords set for the things that their AI agents want to do. And that's incredibly different than what we've called GDP in the past”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, or it might be investment. Maybe he's going to defer his consumption to once he's like after colonizing galaxy. Yeah, yeah. And I'm not saying this is the world I want. I'm just saying, think about it physically. If you're colonizing the galaxy, which you can do potentially after AGI, I'm not saying it'll happen tomorrow after AGI, right? But there's a thing that's physically possible is that growth, like something's happening that's explosive”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I don't need to assume that. It seems like you're saying, look, if 99% of consumers are no longer consumers, where's this economic identity coming from? And I'm just saying, okay, if one person cares about colonizing the galaxy, that's generating a lot of demand. It takes a lot of stuff to colonize the galaxy. So this world where even if there's not an egalitarian world where everybody is roughly contributing equivalent amounts of demand, the potential for one person alone to generate this demand is so high enough that like.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me make this a little more concrete. Suppose that AI is going to produce a bounty of the things that humans desire, and that's going to be what growth is. How will it get to the humans if the humans don't have a job? And if the humans don't have a job, why will AI be? So in other words, if there's no consumers to buy my cars, why am I building cars?”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm just saying this is not his croc. Sam Alban could say it, or the AI could say it. If some Asian cares about this, and they're not stopped from doing it, like this is just like, physically you can easily see where the 20% growth is coming from.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, but the program goes off and colonizes the solar system. It's not like. A dude telling it colonized in the solar system now and doing all this stuff, it's like the AI has made the decision to do it, and Sam Altman's sitting back there saying, oh, well, I'm saying this is not a question.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One argument is simply that if there's any agent, AI or human who cares about colonizing the galaxy, even if 99% of agents don't care about that, if one agent cares, they can go do it. Colonizing the galaxy is a lot of growth because the galaxy is really big, right? So it's very easy for me to imagine if like Sam Alvin decides to launch the probes, how breaking down Mars and sending out the virus probes generates 20% growth.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and Okay, so we're like launching the Dyson spears. We're not allowed to count that because the AIs are doing it. I mean, I want to know what the solar system will look like. I don't care what the semantics of that are. And I think the better way to capture what is physically happening is just.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In 1700s, I could tell you exactly who was buying stuff. He was everybody, peasants. In fact, people wrote these things around 1900 about what the world would look like in 100 years, you know, what we'll have. They didn't get exactly the right things right that we'll have, but they correctly identified that it would be regular consumers who would be buying all these things regular people. And so that came true. It was obvious. But here's my point. Suppose that 99% of people do not have a job and are not getting paid income and all the money is going to sort of Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and five other guys. Okay. And they're captive AIs that they own because for some reason our property rights system still exists. But okay, suppose that that's the future we're contemplating, right? And so 99% of people or more don't have any job. They don't have any income. They're out on the street. And yet you're saying 20% growth a year. That growth is defined by people, consumers, paying for things and saying here is what you find justice people. Okay.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, I don't know. So you could have said in 10,000 BC the economy is going to be a billion times bigger in 10,000 years. What does it mean to produce a billion times more stuff than we're producing right now? Who's buying all this stuff? You can't predict that in advance.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For Tyler's argument, bottlenecks. I think the problem with that argument is that there's always bottlenecks, right? So you could have said before the Industrial Revolution, well, we will never 10x the rate of growth because there will be bottlenecks. And that doesn't tell you about, like, you empirically have to just look at the fraction of the economy that'll be bottlenecked and what is the fraction that's not, and then actually derive the rate of growth. The fact that there's bottlenecks doesn't tell you, yeah, okay,”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Looks the same Yeah, I think if we have chatbots that can answer hard math questions, I don't expect the world to look that different because the fraction of economic value that is generated by math is like extremely small, but there's other jobs that are much more mundane than quote unquote PhD intelligence, which Chatbot just cannot do, right? A chatbot cannot edit videos for me. And once those are automated, I actually expect a pretty crazy world because the big bottleneck to growth has been that human population can only increase at this slow clip and in fact one of the reasons that growth has slowed since the 70s is that in developing countries the population has plateaued with AI, the capital and the labor”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Yeah. And it will be lower than the cost of keeping a human alive. So even if a human could do the exact same labor, a human needs a lot of stuff to stay alive, let alone to grow a human, everything. An H100 cost $40,000 today. The yearly cost of running it is like thousands of dollars. If we can just buy more H100s, right? If we currently pay the algorithm for AGI, we could run it on H100. And yeah.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the problem has been that people underestimate how many things are truly needed to automate human labor. And so they think like we've got reasoning. And now that we've got reasoning, like this is what it takes to take over a job. And I think, in fact, there's much more to a job than is assumed. That's why I wrote this blog post where I'm like, look, it's not a couple years away. It might be longer than that. Then there's another question of like by 2100 will there be jobs that humans are doing if you just like zoom out long enough will we ever be able to make machines that can think and do physical labor at least as cheaply and as well as humans can and fundamentally the big advantage they have is like we can keep building more of them right so we make as many of those machines as the value they generate equals the cost of producing them”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, human labor is also complementary to other human labor, right? There's increasing returns to scale, but that doesn't mean that Microsoft has to hire some number of software engineers. And it will care about the cost of what the software engineers cost. It will go to markets where they can get the highest performance for the relative value those software engineers are bringing in. I think it will be a similar story with AI labor and human labor. And AI labor just has the benefit of having extremely low subsistence wages, like the marginal cost of keeping an H100 running is much lower than the cost of keeping a human alive for a year.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Essentially, never seem to think in these terms. They always seem to think in terms of perfect substitutability. And so I'm trying to get to the bottom of why people insist on always thinking in terms of perfect substitutability when every other tool has been complementary in the end.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that might vary by job. Like, cars may be one thing, but maybe it is about capabilities. I can't say. I'm just saying everybody seems to think that AI is a perfect substitute for humans, and that's what it should be, and that's what it will be. And everyone seems to think of it in that case. However, every other tool that's ever been made, every other technological tool was a complement to humans, it could do something humans could do. Maybe even it could do anything humans could do, but different relative costs, different relative prices, so that you'd have humans do something and the tool do other things, and you'd have this complementarity between the two. And yet when people talk about AI and think about AI, they...”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So it's interesting AI is better for diagnosis on a lot of things than humans. But then something about having humans to follow up with makes me also want to check with a human after I've gotten diagnoses from an AI on something.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I expect there would be much less of that than people assume. If you just look at the example of Waymore versus Uber, I think you could previously could have had this thing about people we hesitate to take automated rides. And in fact, in the cities where it's been deployed, people love this product, despite the fact that you had to wait 20 minutes because the demand is so high and it's still like it got some glitches to iron out. But just the seamlessness of using machines to do things for you, the fact that it can be like personalized to you, it can happen immediately. One thing people would be like, okay, well, doctors and lawyers will set up guilds. And so you won't be able to consult. I think there might be guilds on who can call themselves a doctor or a lawyer. But I just think if genuinely ChatGPT can be as good medical advice as a real doctor, the experience of just talking to a shop bot rather than spending three hours in a waiting room is so much better that I think a lot of sectors of the economy look like this where we're assuming people will care about having a human, but in fact they will not if you assume that they will genuinely have the capabilities that the human brings to bear.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so here's my question about replacing jobs. It seems to me that it's partly by demand. So, for example, suppose that AI has already replaced my job or can replace my job, so that suppose that anyone who fires up ChatGPT or whatever model and says, search the web, find the most interesting topics that people are talking about, economics and write me an insightful post telling me some cool new thing I should think about that. And they just do that every day. And then they get a better blog than no opinion. Know if that's happened yet. I mean, I've tried that and I don't like it as much, but suppose that most people will like it as much, and so my job as an automated and people just don't realize it, or people have this sort of idea in their mind of like, well.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I probably wouldn't be a podcaster if I could answer that question. It just seems to me that a lot of the modalities we have today to teach LLM stuff do not constitute this kind of continual learning. For example, making the system prompt better is not the kind of continual learning or on the job training that my human employees experience or RL fine-tuning is not this, but what the solution to this looks like is precisely because I don't have an obvious solution that I think we're many years away.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The reason humans are so valuable is not just their raw intellect, it's not mainly the raw intellect, although that's important. It's their ability to build up context. It's interrogate their own failures and pick up small efficiencies and improvements as they practice a task. Whereas within AI model, it's understanding of your problem, your business will be expunged by the end of a session. And then you're starting off at the baseline of the model. With a human, you got to strain them over many months to make them useful employees.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source