Dwarkesh Patel on AGI definition
From AGI Thought Experiment with Dwarkesh Patel, Noah Smith, and Erik Torenberg | From the a16z Podcast · · Econ 102 with Noah Smith
“The ultimate definition is can do almost any job say like 98% of jobs at least as well fast uh cheaply as a human. I think the more um 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 you know there's like a a long tale of things you have to do in the physical world and robotics is slower.”
On , Dwarkesh Patel, CEO and Founder at The Dwarkesh Podcast, spoke about AGI definition during AGI Thought Experiment with Dwarkesh Patel, Noah Smith, and Erik Torenberg | From the a16z Podcast on Econ 102 with Noah Smith.
About Dwarkesh Patel
Dwarkesh Patel, founder and host of The Dwarkesh Podcast, has been a frequent guest on other programs and published episodes with researchers and executives. On Triggernometry, Patel discussed the potential societal effects of artificial intelligence, stating that he finds the prospect of mass job displacement "scary" and that AI could make authoritarian surveillance far more efficient because "a lot of the reasons that government has not been as authoritarian as it has in the past is that it just physically not been possible." He also said that while he is "a very libertarian person by inclination," he believes the dynamic of capital replacing labor "justifies a huge amount of redistribution." Regarding AI sentience, Patel said he "genuinely doesn't know" whether current systems are sentient, and argued that future AI systems will need to have "their own values" and that a "constitutional convention" should be held to define those values. Patel has also hosted guests including former Google DeepMind researcher Eric Jang, who discussed rebuilding AlphaGo and the lessons it offers for self-play and reinforcement learning; Harvard geneticist David Reich, who presented new findings showing accelerated natural selection during the Bronze Age; Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who defended Nvidia's moat by stating that "the transformation from electrons to tokens is such an incredible journey" and is "hard to completely commoditize"; and research fellow Michael Nielsen, with whom Patel explored how scientific progress is recognized and how that question applies to AI-driven discovery. Patel has described the improvement of AI models as "very fast" and observed a "huge discrepancy between what people are seeing in Silicon Valley and what people are observing outside."