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

“Okay, you got Spock. He's very logical. He I think it'll continue to be alien, but I think eventually we will gain capabilities which are necessary to unlock the trillions of dollars of economic value that are implied by automating human labor, which these models are clearly not generating right now. So you could say if we substituted jobs right now, immediately there'd be a huge productivity dip. But over time, we would learn to start doing them better. I mean, maybe a better example is just that you hire people to do things for you. I don't know if you actually hire people, but I assume OK. Why do you're still having to do that rather than hiring an AI? And I have many rules where it's like an AI might be generating hundreds of dollars of value for me a month, but like humans are generating thousands of dollars or tens of thousands of dollars of value for me a month. Why is that the case? And I think it's just like AIs are lacking these capabilities, humans have these capabilities.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, but so let's take another similar example. Let's take Star Trek. Yeah. Okay, you got Spock. He's very logical. He can do stuff that Kirk and whoever can't do. But then those guys can do stuff that Spock can't do, get in touch with their emotions, intuition, stuff like that. They're both general intelligences, but they're alien to each other. So AI feels alien to me. Sometimes it talks just like us. It was built off of our thoughts, obviously, but then sometimes it talks just like us and sometimes it's just like very alien. And so should we ever expect that to change such that it's no longer an alien intelligence?”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What else is it that we want them to do? I think with humans, we have more of a sense of there's some other human who theoretically could do what you would do. An individual copy of a model might be, say, fine-tuned to do a particular job. And it would be fair to say, then why expect this particular fine-tune to be able to do any job in the economy? But then there's a question of, well, there's many different models in the world, and each model might have many different fine tunes or many different instances. Any one of them should be able to do a particular white-collar job for it to count as AGI. It's not that like any AGI should be able to do every single job, that some artificial intelligence should be able to do this job for this model to count as AGI.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, I have a question. I am a natural general intelligence. You are a natural general intelligence, but we cannot easily do each other's jobs, even though our jobs are fairly similar. Put me in the Dwarkesh podcast and I could not interview people nearly so well if you had to write substack articles like several times a week. On economics, you might not do as well. But we are general intelligences and we're not exactly substitutable. So, why should we use substitutability as the criterion for AGI?”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm just noticing that if there was a human who was working for me, they could do things for me that these models cannot do, right? And I'm not talking about something super advanced. I'm just saying I have transcripts for my podcast. I want you to rewrite them the way a human would. And then I'll give you feedback about what you messed up. And I want you to integrate that feedback as you get better over time. You learn my preferences, you learn my content. And they can't learn over the course of six months how to become a better editor for me or how to become a better transcriptor for me. Since a human hierarchy would be able to do this, they can. So therefore, it's not AGI.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, we've been surprised what capabilities have come first in AIs. Like they can reason already and why they seem to lack the economic value we would have assumed would correspond to that level of capability. This thing can reason, but it's making OpenAI $10 billion a year. And McDonald's and Cole is making more than $10 billion a year, right? So clearly there's more things relevant to automating entire jobs than we previously assumed. So then it's just useful to like, who knows what all those things are, but once they can automate it, then it's AGI.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So the ultimate definition is can do almost any job, say like 98% of jobs, at least as well fast, cheaply as a human. I think the definition that's often useful for near-term debates is can automate 95% of white collar work because there's a clear path to get to that, whereas robotics, there's like a long tail of things you have to do in the physical world and robotics disorder. So automate white color work.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every other technological tool was a compliment to humans, and yet when people talk about AI and think about AI, they essentially never seem to think in these terms, they always seem to think in terms of perfect substitutability.”
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 their ability to build up context, it's to interrogate their own failures, and pick up small efficiencies and improvements as they practice a task. Whereas with an AI model, it's understanding of your problem, your business will be expunged by the end of a session.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI might be generating hundreds of dollars of value for me a month, but like humans generating thousands of dollars or tens of thousands of dollars of value for me a month. Why is that the case? And I think it's just like AIs are lacking these capabilities, humans have these capabilities.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source