If its THE exponential curve of AGI, every day not invested, will result in years behind in a few months. So these are rather small investments, but still bigger then the "to little to late" of the european union.
Its not very visual or intuitive, but in some games, were the resource curve is exponential, small early headstarts become whole armies, were the opponent fields none in very short time.
Especially as AGI is expected to be a multiplicator on alot of other sectors. All those breakthroughs, could become daily occurances, created by a AGI on schedule. It could really become one country that glows, and the rest of the planet falling eternally behind.
This assumes that you can't steal information to catch up quickly, or that progress made isn't easy to copy once it's obvious that it works.
A big part of why chatgpt is a big deal is that it shows that the overall approach is worth pursuing. Throwing stupid numbers of GPUs at a problem you don't know will be solvable is hard to justify. It's easy to throw money at a problem you know is solvable.
Nuclear weapons are the prime example of this: Russia caught up both by stealing information and just by knowing fission was possible/feasible as an explosive.
Right, and this is why human intelligence didn't dominate the planet and why the animals quickly caught up and stopped humans from driving so many species extinct....
If you don't know the formula for the equation and the values plugged in, then you like me, have no idea where the curve levels off at.
The real limiting factor of AGI is not going to be AGI -- it's going to be everything else.
Digitization of the last mile (instrumentation, feedback), local networking, local compute, business familiarity with technology, standardized processes, regulatory environment, etc.
AGI will happen when it happens.
But if it happens and an economy doesn't have all the enabling prerequisites, it's not going to have time to develop them, because those are years-long migration and integration efforts.
Which doesn't bode well for AGI + developing economies.
I wouldn't be so sure about that because of the Region Beta paradox. Developed countries have processes that work, making all of them digital and connected is often a bigger uphill battle than starting from zero and doing it right the first time.
See also communication infrastructure in developing economies. It's often much easier to get good internet connection (in reasonably populated areas) if there is no 100-year-old copper infrastructure around that is "good enough" for many.
On the one hand, I'd say developed countries are much farther along in digitizing (as part of efficiency optimization) their processes. Mostly by virtue that their companies are essentially management/orchestration processes on top of subcontracted manufacturing.
On the other hand, it gives developing countries an opportunity to skip the legacy step and go right to the state of the art.
I'm still skeptical the latter will dominate though.
I'd assume most of the developing world is still operating "good enough to work" processes, which are largely manual. Digitizing those processes will be a nightmare, because it plays out on organizational-political timespans.
Its not very visual or intuitive, but in some games, were the resource curve is exponential, small early headstarts become whole armies, were the opponent fields none in very short time.
Especially as AGI is expected to be a multiplicator on alot of other sectors. All those breakthroughs, could become daily occurances, created by a AGI on schedule. It could really become one country that glows, and the rest of the planet falling eternally behind.