AI
The Winning Essays for the Big Questions About AI
Dwarkesh Patel announced the three winners of his AI essay contest, which received 600 submissions.
Key takeaways
- The OpenAI Foundation should dedicate tens of billions of dollars to physical infrastructure to end airborne transmission of pathogens.
- Countries outside the AI supply chain should avoid populist restrictions and instead lower capital taxes and remove controls to attract investment.
- AI API pricing is deflating roughly 10x per year due to distillation and open-source alternatives, making APIs structurally unprofitable for funding future training.
- AI labs should adopt Hong Kong's MTR 'rail plus property' model, capturing value from the surrounding ecosystem rather than the API itself.
Dwarkesh Patel announced the three winners of his AI essay contest, which received 600 submissions. First place went to Jassi Pannu, an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University, who proposed a biosecurity and physical infrastructure roadmap for the OpenAI Foundation to eliminate airborne pathogens. Second place went to Ege Erdil, co-founder of Mechanize, who argued that countries outside the AI supply chain should focus on growth-oriented policies, strong property rights, and low capital taxes to prepare for labor automation. The third essay compared AI API pricing and infrastructure to the business model of Hong Kong's MTR, suggesting labs capture value from surrounding developments rather than relying on unprofitable API sales or subsidies.
In their words
“do nothing and ignore populist pressures to take radical actions”
By the numbers
- 600
- Essays submitted for the AI big questions contest
- 10x
- Annual deflation rate of AI API prices
- $15-25B
- Funding needed for large-scale pathogen-free infrastructure deployments
- 30%
- Capital's current output share in our world
- 45
- Age in years of Hong Kong's MTR public-private hybrid model
How it unfolded
- Recent attempt to overthrow Tinubu
- Hong Kong's MTR was built
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Common questions
- Where can I read the original report?
- Read the full report at dwarkesh_patel.
