Post-AI Jobs Will Go to a Tiny Sliver

You might push back by saying this is only for the people not trying very hard, or who aren't that smart or whatever. I largely agree with you, but it doesn't matter. You and me and Dwarkesh and Karpathy are going to be fine. So what? Or hell, even 25%.

Google has the total number of knowledge workers at over 1 billion! If AI only eats the absolute worst, bottom 50% of knowledge workers in the next 5-10 years, we're still talking about hundreds of millions of jobs. This is why I disagree with Karpathy on this. It's not because he's wrong. He's not.

But he's focused on the wrong thing. If the thing we care about is AI's near-term and practical impact on humanity, the thing to watch is not how smart individual models are, or the specific technical limitations of RL to achieving continuous learning. It's the trillions of dollars being invested in replacing the static worst 50% of human workers. Those trillions are being spent on having the Worker Replacement System be just general enough to hit that mark. So my question to you is, given what we see in model improvement and systems like Claude Code that exponentially magnify model capability, do you really want to bet against that happening?

And this is why I think "AGI" will be here before 2028. Not because all the stuff Karpathy is talking about will be solved, but because it won't matter if they are. NotesAnother example is when Sholto was like, our AI pipelines for improving AI and doing AI work, doing AI research are all extremely crappy. They're all basically duct tape and string and silly putty. And almost every part of the process can be improved (paraphrased).

This is part of my greater point I've been talking about since early 2023, which I call "slack in the rope. " There are a thousand different ways that could be improved that all make up the composite result of an improvement to the overall system.