How gloriously rich AI will make us

Well, assuming that aritifical intelligence is going to add any value at all that is.

Last week, Eliezer Yudkowsky, co-founder of an AI lab, made a startling discovery: AI models can copy each other far more easily than anyone previously thought, and the larceny is almost impossible to stop.

“If you allow any sufficiently wide-ranging access to your AI model,” he explained, “you're giving away your business crown jewels to competitors that can then nearly clone your model without all the hard work you did.”

The result? “You no longer have a competitive moat,” he says, referencing industry jargon for a competitive advantage that’s hard to beat.

Assume that some new technology actually is going to add some value. There are two places that value add can go. Either to consumers in the consumer surplus - the amount we would be willing to pay but don’t have to - or to the capitalists in profits.

The defining point over which happens is how easy is it to copy that first innovation? If it’s difficult then that’s Warren Buffet’s moat against competition coming and eating your profits. If it’s easy then competition does eat all the profits and the value add ends up with consumers.

The easier AI is to copy then the more of the value will accrue to consumers - the easier it is to copy the richer it will make us and not the capitalists.

Which is nice, isn’t it? Also, it means we don’t need to tax the capitalists who make the AIs because we’ll already be doing that through the competition. Which is also nice - we leave them be to make us richer that is.