[emaadm]

> We are already near the limits of what we can do

Hard disagree. If I had a million Claudes worth of compute I'd be livestreaming my entire reality feed to a local server 24/7 and having it organize my observations and thoughts, synthesize new ideas, implement prototypes and discard infeasible ones while I sleep. If you're in the business of knowledge creation, a million Claudes isn't enough. Text is an easy modality, I want foundation models that operate on text, images, audio, video, streaming point clouds, ...

[mysecretaccount]

Using a single Claude agent, ask it to generate "new" ideas and it will generate an immense list. Ask it to rank those ideas by novelty and it will comply.

The results will be lackluster. Additional agents will not improve the result.

[TheOtherHobbes]

I call this the Laurie Anderson fallacy, from a line in one of her songs:

> "Heaven is exactly like where you are right now, but much, much better."

If a million Claudes of compute were accessible, people would not be doing the same things they are now, but more so. They'd be doing very different things we likely can't imagine - in the same way that Alan Turing imagined machines learning from experience, but didn't imagine downstream products like Sora, ad tech, or social media, or their cultural and economic effects.

[mysecretaccount]

> If a million Claudes of compute were accessible, people would not be doing the same things they are now, but more so. They'd be doing very different things we likely can't imagine

You may as well make the same argument about commanding a billion Nintendo 64s. We cannot simply scale up Claude instances like you say, its ability to produce interesting output is bounded by the underlying model.

[sfn42]

There's nothing (except their capacity and your token budget I guess) stopping anyone from having a million simultaneous conversations with Claude right now.

Maybe a million is a stretch but thousands is completely doable right now. That's thousands of Claudes. Knock yourself out.

[TheOtherHobbes]

But that's the point. No human has the capacity to handle a million simultaneous conversations, any million-sized workflow would have to be AI-managed itself, and it's not even clear what the goals would be.

If it ever becomes possible to say "build me a unicorn" you're going to get millions of people trying to do the same thing, and you no longer have the same economy.

Because the features that generate unicorns stop being unusual.

Startup slop instead of art slop.

Which is the real problem with AI. Work gets cheap, original value stays expensive no matter how much compute you throw at it.

Because if it gets cheap too, it gets commoditised and stops being valuable.

And globally that applies to everything.

AI will either have to be tightly rationed, or it will murder the competitive economy.

[sfn42]

That's my point. Person above is like "if I had a million Claudes I'd be Rick Sanchez", I'm saying they can do that right now so go ahead.

[anentropic]

I doubt you create that much knowledge