AI models are rapidly getting better, and there are some interesting insights from the people at the forefront of this revolution as to how rapid their progress really is.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that AI models are increasing at the rate of one standard deviation per year. He said simultaneously the cost of intelligence is falling every year by a factor of 10. If these trends hold, a fast-takeoff scenario, which Altman has said has become more likely than before, could well end up happening.
“Your model is actually improving quite a bit, right? Like, ten times a year? What’s your measurement?” Softbank Chairman Masayoshi Son asked Altman in an interview. “You know, very roughly, it feels to me like — this is not scientifically accurate, this is just sort of a vibe or spiritual answer — but every year we move one standard deviation of IQ. Also every year, the cost of last year’s intelligence falls by about a factor of ten,” Altman replied.
Altman seemed to be saying that AI will not only get smarter very quickly, but will get cheaper even quicker. If AI intelligence follows a normal distribution, an increase of one standard deviation per year would mean the new models outperform a significant portion of older models. For example, if last year’s AI model was at the mean intelligence level, then this year’s model would be smarter than about 84% of last year’s models (since moving up 1σ puts it above 84% of the previous distribution). Over multiple years, this would lead to rapid and significant advancements — in just three years, AI models would be at a level that surpasses 99.7% of the intelligence of models from three years prior.
These are pretty incredible predictions. If Sam Altman’s predictions are correct, and we assume that AI models are already as smart as the average human, AI will be exponentially smarter than most human beings on earth in just three years. At the same time, these smarts will be available for essentially free — if AI is becoming 10x cheaper every year, in three years, it would be 1/1000th as cheap as today. With subscriptions to ChatGPT for nearly unlimited number of queries already costing just $20 per month, they could cost just $0.02 per month in three years. And there’s no telling how the world would be transformed if all this intelligence were to be freely available for all to use.