Episode Details

[see also Four Ways Learning Economics makes you people dumber future AI]

This is a tweet by Seb Krier that caught my eye. The exact person and exact points are incidental. It illustrates what to is a flaw in many 'economics' frames on AI.

Expecting a model to do all the work, solve everything, come up with new innovations etc is probably not right. This was kinda the implicit assumption behind *some* interpretations of capabilities progress. The ‘single genius model’ overlooks the fact that inference costs and context windows are finite.

(...) People overrate individual intelligence: most innovations are the product of social organisations (cooperation) and market dynamics (competition), not a single genius savant.

(...) Most of the *value* and transformative changes we will get from AI will come from products, not models. The models are the cognitive raw power, the products are what makes them useful and adapted to what some user class actually needs.

This seems to me missing something incredible important about what Artificial General Intelligence will actually be. [1] There is a certain type of economist [eg Tyler Cowen] that will proclaim AGI is near [or even already here!] and apply their standard [...]

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Outline:

(01:45) AGI as a Tool; AGI as an Agent

(05:03) One Big Transformer

(06:52) The Dismal Science

(09:02) The Comfort of Familiar Frames

(10:19) Your Left Brain Doesn't Trade With Your Right

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
May 23rd, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Lid8cv9qF7nac53va/your-left-brain-doesn-t-trade-with-your-right

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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