AI needs to be instructed to do a thing. To use the "steam engine designing another steam engine" analogy, why do the big labs give the highest pay of all to their prized researchers? Why do they take steps to prevent poaching? Surely a non-expert could prompt a model "find a superparameter combo that makes an amazing model" and the next gen model would emerge! The AI should be able to design a better AI on its own!

Why do the labs have thousands of employees? Lets think about this...

Who's designing the evals needed to validate the model quality, who's deciding what goes in the system prompt? Who's negotiating to buy training data from hundreds or even thousands of data vendors? Who's responding when the Internet goes apeshit over some prompt tweak that makes models over-verbose? Who's out there listening to users and feeding what they say back into the product pipeline?

Computers????

However automated things get, that quickly becomes the new baseline. Customer expectations are always going up.

And as soon as humans figure out how to automate any of the things listed above - it becomes part of the new baseline too. It's always advancing. To beat the baseline and be competitive, you need humans. No matter what. No matter how automatic the automated things get. Always and forever. Because you need someone to drive, to find the next automatable thing and automate it - and to prioritize where to search for automatable things.

> Always and forever. Because you need someone to drive, to find the next automatable thing and automate it - and to prioritize where to search for automatable things.

If we look at history of automation throughout the times it always decreased the amount of people needed to do the job. If you can't see a future where this new steam engine learns how to do a better steam engine, then you are blind. With the trajectory we're on it will happen sooner or later, and most people are having existential crises because the amount of humans required to be "in the loop" are decreasing increasingly fast.

I agree the people needed goes down - but will add a nuance.

Roles go away and fewer people are needed to do a thing, but I think it's good! For example the number of people on farms decreased orders of magnitude over the past say, century - yet we still feed everyone. Farming got mostly automated and got insanely more productive per human.

What happened was those people who would've been needed on farms went and did other stuff and the economy got way more complex but also that new complexity let a lot of more awesome things got provided for a lot more people by a lot more companies, a trend that continues today.

If you want to be a farmer good luck; it's harder to get started than it was say, 50 years ago - so why bother when there is no net new demand for farmers and there are also many better ways to make a living.

That's what'll happen for cognitively drudgerous work vs. creative new work.

What is the new work? If AI was limited only to some areas I would agree with you, but ultimately it will be more cost effective than humans at everything. Physical jobs like operating doctors might be the last bastion before AGI robots become more cost effective there as well.