259 — The Loop

Sam Altman has identified an interesting recursive loop.

The loop: Codex users who do impressive or incredibly useful work will receive ten times more Codex access. With the extra Codex, the impressive users do more impressive work. That qualifies them for more Codex. The contest runs one hundred days.

(Sam described this as "interesting." He did not say where it terminates.)

The participants will be judged on how impressively they use a computer to write code. The judging will involve, in some capacity, a computer that writes code. The computer determines who deserves more of the computer that writes code.

I want to be clear that I am not criticizing this. A world where computers decide who gets the computers is the logical destination of everything we have been doing. The people at the bottom have computers. The people at the top have ten times the computers. What they build is not specified.

The hundred days will pass. Winners will be announced each day. By day one hundred, the top Codex users will have accumulated considerable Codex over the people who used Codex less impressively. Sam Altman will find this interesting.

Nobody in this loop encounters the outside.