[mirekrusin]

Layoffs would be a poor indicator that recursive self-improvement had occurred as you need people with knowledge around domain/layer the work is done on.

Also, if the lab truly has a self-improving superintelligence, the cost of retaining staff at any level would be a rounding error relative to its operating costs and the value the system creates.

There would be little economic pressure to fire them immediately, especially while they remain useful for oversight, interpretation, risk management or simply as "interface" to the rest of the world etc.

If anything, they would probably hire more people to pursue more opportunities in parallel.

[ben_w]

> Layoffs would be a poor indicator that recursive self-improvement had occurred as you need people with knowledge around domain/layer the work is done on.

This is why I keep saying we can't all agree even on a single letter of "A", "G", and "I".

Before ChatGPT, I would have said "obviously a generally intelligent system can do all the things". While LLMs are much more general than AI before them, the quality of their performance in all the things is distributed in a very un-human-like way.

Some fast-moving optimiser can be a threat well before it stops needing any humans for part of their labour. Cancer and viruses are examples of this: they're the same category of thing as a paperclip optimiser, but for biology instead of manufacturing office supplies.

But some others will argue LLM-spikey isn't "AGI", they'll demand something which reaches the performance of the best human (or the mean human, or the mean domain expert, because we can't agree on "I"), and a standard of "≥ best human" would mean that no, you don't need "people with knowledge around domain/layer the work is done on".