Gwern — Anonymous writer who predicted AI trajectory on $12K/year salary

Gwern Branwen explains how he predicted LLM scaling laws living on $12K/year and why writing now is the most important act before AGI.

• Gwern sustains full-time research on ~$12K/year via Patreon ($900-1K/month) plus early Bitcoin savings, no health insurance, lives rurally.
• He uses Anthropic’s 2028 AGI timeline as his personal planning horizon, believing AI could replicate Gwern-quality essays in 2-3 years.
• GPT-3’s few-shot learning chart was his definitive confirmation of the scaling hypothesis; he says most observers misread it as a failure.
• Key insight others missed: the 2017 scaling laws paper showing neural network performance scales continuously — he calls it should have been paper of the year.
• Writing now is a vote on AI’s future values: unwritten preferences effectively don’t exist to LLMs trained on text, making this a critical window.
• Company automation will go bottom-up first, leaving a human CEO doing taste/vision while AI executes — fully AI firms will make myopic mistakes.
• GLP weight-loss drugs surprised him most as an underappreciated trend; he gives near-100% odds something in our environment is harming us the way lead did Romans.

2024-11-13 · Watch on YouTube