Essay 3 is obvious Claude slop. But what's more of a shame is that the essay is just bad. Candidate #1 is Candidate #4 - give the labs exclusive access to health or tax data. Candidates #2 and #3 have no corollary with the Hong Kong MTR - they are the bog standard responses AI likes to give when you ask about model lab moats.
Moreover, the argument just doesn't work - what is the business model that allows AI companies to earn back capex and justify trillion-dollar valuations using tax data? No attempt to answer this from Claude. What is the political logic behind giving a single lab - bearing in mind AI is just about the most hated thing in the US - access to everyone's confidential health records, so that they can, I guess, optimise care or something? It's just all deeply incoherent.
It gets points for novelty, I guess - who has ever compared AI economics to the Hong Kong MTR before? - but that's about it.
Wow, disappointed by Ege Erdil's essay. Those policies were tried to death all over the world in all kinds of contexts and they just fail almost every time. I'm not seeing a good argument for why they would work better as we get closer to AGI. On the contrary, if you open up the economy of medium-to-large population countries like Nigeria so much, jobs there will be lost faster, there will be economic and social disruptions (less stability, the contrary of what he says is needed), and at best the result would be an enclave economy with the majority of the population being poorer (capital will just extract value and repatriate the profits with little to no benefit for the country). Also, saying that those policies "already work well in increasing growth and improving productivity" is, again, sadly wrong.
Agreed. There's also an internal contradiction. Pillar two is "provide stability," but pillar one (dismantle unions, repeal licensing, strip wage protections in a labor-abundant country mid-automation) is the fastest way to destroy it. Not to mention the load-bearing assumption of full automation is never argued for, and no timeline for it is ever defined. "What do you do right now" presupposes there's something to do and that it needs doing, which I'd assume is why the question exists. His answer is that there isn't: the right policies won't be adopted because these governments are too dysfunctional, so hold still and hope the incumbents blunder. Spending a thousand words on that circular logic seems rather unconstructive.
For his premise to work, Erdil needed India to be an NPC, so he made it one. The move happens in a single parenthetical "governments with poor track records such as India and Nigeria". Nigeria at least gets the broken grid and a coup attempt with a date attached. India gets grouped in by adjacency and left there, a body in the background that exists to confirm a category.
This is relevant because said category is doing the essay's heaviest lifting. If India is a functional-enough state to actually execute the deregulatory reforms Erdil is recommending, then his entire "do nothing" conclusion falls apart. A country that built UPI, ran ISRO on a fraction of NASA's budget, and manufactured sixty percent of the world's vaccines during a pandemic is not a country without institutional capacity. Solving for its highly uneven institutional capacity, is a completely different analytical problem and one his framework has no room for, because it needs India inert.
An NPC doesn't make decisions that change the game. It populates the world so the main characters have somewhere to move through. That's the role India plays in this essay. The argument requires it to stay still, to be reliably dysfunctional, to confirm that the AI future belongs to the countries already inside the production chain. The moment India becomes an actor with a real decision tree the essay has to get more complicated. Erdil chose not to write that essay and I can't decide if the intellectual laziness is structural.
Yeah, I didn't see the author acknowledging that people might legitimately value things other than GDP. For example, wealth inequality in a society can create real problems.
Yes, I can. My favourite example is the neoliberal experiments of Martinez de Hoz during the Argentine genocidal dictatorship from 1976, followed inmediately by a close application of the Washington Consensus by Menem in the 90s, resulting in the spectacular crisis of 2001, with bank runs, social chaos and a ruined country to this day.
The first essay is a great idea (now being done by Stripe) but doesn't seem to involve much use of AI, so does OAI Foundation have much of a comparative advantage aside from pure capital?
The second essay is reasonably good, but (a) doesn't condition its recommendations on the political economy at all, which seems strange (b) doesn't account terms of trade analyses, or for industries which remain unautomated by providing experiences or status goods. For example New Zealand is in a good position due to being an on net professional services importer (automatable services deficit), but having a significant fraction of its economy made up of tourism, demand for which may increase when people have more free time.
Disappointed by the third essay—it seems clearly AI written:
> “When do labs make money?” has the same structure as “when does rail pay for itself through fares?” It doesn’t, and that’s the wrong question.
Also, the 4 ideas for the third essay's thesis are clearly flawed. The first and fourth are effectively the same idea and are both "government gives labs a regulatory moat". The second is confused (RL data is not unreplicable at all and is a depreciating asset), the third is incoherent (FDEs are not the same thing at all as selling outcomes or services; and even if you sell services then does this not also get commoditized or run into competition at the application layer?).
Congrats to the finalists and Jassi for winning! I thought the open questions were fun thought exercises with lots of directions for writers to explore.
It was a bit disappointing to see an AI-generated essay place in the top three (a pangram link ~confirming as much is pasted below). Reading it felt like there was a novel idea waiting in the initial prompt, but it was sloppified over the course of 1,000 words.
^Acknowledging that false positives exist, but the essay just feels like the kind of slop one would get if they pasted in the prompt along with something about “new angles.”
Specially to the first place - I had no idea that ending *all* airborne disease could be anything close to feasible. Hopefully it can be done within our generation.
The property-above-the-station framing holds up better than the railroad analogy everyone reaches for. Toll roads and utilities went the same way, the pipe stays cheap and regulated while the money sits in what gets built alongside it. Forward-deployed integration is the version that's already visible, since owning the service delivery end beats charging per token for it.
Ege Erdil’s essay reads like an open-and-shut case against AI. We are already suffering from runaway wealth concentration. A future where labor becomes obsolete and capitalists are given unlimited ability to accumulate capital would be a dystopia if allowed to happen. This nightmare will not come about for the simple reason that people won’t stand for it. Try again, Mr. Erdil, and see if you can’t come up with an AI future that doesn’t consign 99.999% of humanity to extinction.
The issue I see with this is that, over time we shall have a handful of AI overlords (winners handpicked by the government) who have captured ALL the markets owing to their product and the compute they have accumulated over these years. Competition and “free market” go bye bye. ig this is already happening on some level.This is literally the google/gillette/printer ink model of give the product at a minimal cost, monetise on user data/cartidges/ink.
Plus if the past 10-15 years have taught us anything, it is that these large corporations are not to be trusted. They have time and again worked against the public interest for the sake of money. Most (ALL) LLMs today have been trained on stolen work. Giving them further access to confidential and private data, which the government has, to companies which shamelessly flout and expecting them to act right is just ridiculous.
Congratulations! I'm a bit biased but I think Jassi Pannu would be an excellent podcast guest to have on for a real deep dive about the promise (and possible perils) of AI for health and biology
The suggestion that London Underground required billions in government grants is actually not quite right. It’s literally true that TFL receives subsidies but directionally, the TFL subsidies are tiny compared to peer systems. The tube specifically also generates cash - this cash is spent on other TFL services like buses. The poor research on this point undermines my faith in the author’s other data points.
Essay 3 is obvious Claude slop. But what's more of a shame is that the essay is just bad. Candidate #1 is Candidate #4 - give the labs exclusive access to health or tax data. Candidates #2 and #3 have no corollary with the Hong Kong MTR - they are the bog standard responses AI likes to give when you ask about model lab moats.
Moreover, the argument just doesn't work - what is the business model that allows AI companies to earn back capex and justify trillion-dollar valuations using tax data? No attempt to answer this from Claude. What is the political logic behind giving a single lab - bearing in mind AI is just about the most hated thing in the US - access to everyone's confidential health records, so that they can, I guess, optimise care or something? It's just all deeply incoherent.
It gets points for novelty, I guess - who has ever compared AI economics to the Hong Kong MTR before? - but that's about it.
Wow, disappointed by Ege Erdil's essay. Those policies were tried to death all over the world in all kinds of contexts and they just fail almost every time. I'm not seeing a good argument for why they would work better as we get closer to AGI. On the contrary, if you open up the economy of medium-to-large population countries like Nigeria so much, jobs there will be lost faster, there will be economic and social disruptions (less stability, the contrary of what he says is needed), and at best the result would be an enclave economy with the majority of the population being poorer (capital will just extract value and repatriate the profits with little to no benefit for the country). Also, saying that those policies "already work well in increasing growth and improving productivity" is, again, sadly wrong.
Agreed. There's also an internal contradiction. Pillar two is "provide stability," but pillar one (dismantle unions, repeal licensing, strip wage protections in a labor-abundant country mid-automation) is the fastest way to destroy it. Not to mention the load-bearing assumption of full automation is never argued for, and no timeline for it is ever defined. "What do you do right now" presupposes there's something to do and that it needs doing, which I'd assume is why the question exists. His answer is that there isn't: the right policies won't be adopted because these governments are too dysfunctional, so hold still and hope the incumbents blunder. Spending a thousand words on that circular logic seems rather unconstructive.
For his premise to work, Erdil needed India to be an NPC, so he made it one. The move happens in a single parenthetical "governments with poor track records such as India and Nigeria". Nigeria at least gets the broken grid and a coup attempt with a date attached. India gets grouped in by adjacency and left there, a body in the background that exists to confirm a category.
This is relevant because said category is doing the essay's heaviest lifting. If India is a functional-enough state to actually execute the deregulatory reforms Erdil is recommending, then his entire "do nothing" conclusion falls apart. A country that built UPI, ran ISRO on a fraction of NASA's budget, and manufactured sixty percent of the world's vaccines during a pandemic is not a country without institutional capacity. Solving for its highly uneven institutional capacity, is a completely different analytical problem and one his framework has no room for, because it needs India inert.
An NPC doesn't make decisions that change the game. It populates the world so the main characters have somewhere to move through. That's the role India plays in this essay. The argument requires it to stay still, to be reliably dysfunctional, to confirm that the AI future belongs to the countries already inside the production chain. The moment India becomes an actor with a real decision tree the essay has to get more complicated. Erdil chose not to write that essay and I can't decide if the intellectual laziness is structural.
Yeah, I didn't see the author acknowledging that people might legitimately value things other than GDP. For example, wealth inequality in a society can create real problems.
Could you give an example of a time and place where these policies were tried?
Yes, I can. My favourite example is the neoliberal experiments of Martinez de Hoz during the Argentine genocidal dictatorship from 1976, followed inmediately by a close application of the Washington Consensus by Menem in the 90s, resulting in the spectacular crisis of 2001, with bank runs, social chaos and a ruined country to this day.
The first essay is a great idea (now being done by Stripe) but doesn't seem to involve much use of AI, so does OAI Foundation have much of a comparative advantage aside from pure capital?
The second essay is reasonably good, but (a) doesn't condition its recommendations on the political economy at all, which seems strange (b) doesn't account terms of trade analyses, or for industries which remain unautomated by providing experiences or status goods. For example New Zealand is in a good position due to being an on net professional services importer (automatable services deficit), but having a significant fraction of its economy made up of tourism, demand for which may increase when people have more free time.
Disappointed by the third essay—it seems clearly AI written:
> “When do labs make money?” has the same structure as “when does rail pay for itself through fares?” It doesn’t, and that’s the wrong question.
Also, the 4 ideas for the third essay's thesis are clearly flawed. The first and fourth are effectively the same idea and are both "government gives labs a regulatory moat". The second is confused (RL data is not unreplicable at all and is a depreciating asset), the third is incoherent (FDEs are not the same thing at all as selling outcomes or services; and even if you sell services then does this not also get commoditized or run into competition at the application layer?).
I’m a big fan of ending airborne transmission of disease (the winning essay). Let’s knock that one off the list first.
Congrats to the finalists and Jassi for winning! I thought the open questions were fun thought exercises with lots of directions for writers to explore.
It was a bit disappointing to see an AI-generated essay place in the top three (a pangram link ~confirming as much is pasted below). Reading it felt like there was a novel idea waiting in the initial prompt, but it was sloppified over the course of 1,000 words.
Pangram’s analysis: https://www.pangram.com/history/06916f48-c27d-41c4-9802-55946ccd1c28
^Acknowledging that false positives exist, but the essay just feels like the kind of slop one would get if they pasted in the prompt along with something about “new angles.”
Congratulations to the winners!
Specially to the first place - I had no idea that ending *all* airborne disease could be anything close to feasible. Hopefully it can be done within our generation.
The property-above-the-station framing holds up better than the railroad analogy everyone reaches for. Toll roads and utilities went the same way, the pipe stays cheap and regulated while the money sits in what gets built alongside it. Forward-deployed integration is the version that's already visible, since owning the service delivery end beats charging per token for it.
Ege Erdil’s essay reads like an open-and-shut case against AI. We are already suffering from runaway wealth concentration. A future where labor becomes obsolete and capitalists are given unlimited ability to accumulate capital would be a dystopia if allowed to happen. This nightmare will not come about for the simple reason that people won’t stand for it. Try again, Mr. Erdil, and see if you can’t come up with an AI future that doesn’t consign 99.999% of humanity to extinction.
in response to the 3rd essay:
The issue I see with this is that, over time we shall have a handful of AI overlords (winners handpicked by the government) who have captured ALL the markets owing to their product and the compute they have accumulated over these years. Competition and “free market” go bye bye. ig this is already happening on some level.This is literally the google/gillette/printer ink model of give the product at a minimal cost, monetise on user data/cartidges/ink.
Plus if the past 10-15 years have taught us anything, it is that these large corporations are not to be trusted. They have time and again worked against the public interest for the sake of money. Most (ALL) LLMs today have been trained on stolen work. Giving them further access to confidential and private data, which the government has, to companies which shamelessly flout and expecting them to act right is just ridiculous.
What about dialectical-imagination.com
Congratulations! I'm a bit biased but I think Jassi Pannu would be an excellent podcast guest to have on for a real deep dive about the promise (and possible perils) of AI for health and biology
Hong Kong's MTR is far better than Honk Kongs
The suggestion that London Underground required billions in government grants is actually not quite right. It’s literally true that TFL receives subsidies but directionally, the TFL subsidies are tiny compared to peer systems. The tube specifically also generates cash - this cash is spent on other TFL services like buses. The poor research on this point undermines my faith in the author’s other data points.