Schulman, O’Neill and Millidge disagree on 10× AI research

‘Right now, it's already definitely more than 10X of coding stuff’

EXCERPT

SCHULMAN: "Okay. Um, give you 10X total productivity uplift. Basically, if you, if it takes you a year to make a breakthrough now, you, you make a breakthrough every month. I think I would just refuse to give you a scaler on this. Uh, like, like we might already be past that in some, uh, like, types of work. Uh, uh, like if, let's say you're just trying to prove, uh ... Y- you're trying to do, um, like certain types of math, uh, and- Oh, sorry, sorry. But for you as AI researchers trying to make, um- Oh, yeah ... like advance, you know, the state of AI research. This is how much are, like, AI researchers sped up- Yeah ... or uplifted. Somewhere between five and ten years. Oh, really? Okay, that's far away. Well, you think it's longer than, like, for general remote worker? Yeah. Interesting. I think you probably g- I think, I'm realizing you probably have a very different definition of fully g- general remote worker. I could have specified that. Yeah, probably. Yeah. This is true, 'cause I mean, like, yeah. Because obviously, like, an AI researcher can be a remote worker, and so, like- Yeah, no. I, I'm picturing, like, you know, normal white-collar work over the period of a month. Yeah. I think it starts to diverge a little bit past a month. Like, a very competent white-collar worker- Yeah ... but not necessarily, like, a super creative researcher. Yeah. I would say, like, two years. Two years? Yeah. 10X? Okay. How about you, Bernd? I can kinda see that, actually. 'Cause, like, it really is just, like, right now, it's already, like, definitely more than 10X of, like, coding stuff. Yeah. And so it's like, if it can do even, like, one or two loops of, like, experimental feedback, that would actually be massive already. So te- uh, 10X uplift of AI researchers within two years? If you just plug it into, like, a very naive model of, like, AI progress and how much is coming from AI researchers, and they're, like, there's, like, a 10X increase in their productivity. Yeah, you, you have, like, radically accelerated s- pace of AI progress starting two years from now. Yeah, I mean, I think, like, this will mean that AI progress doesn't get bottlenecked on, like, AI researchers' ability to run, like, small experiments. It gets bottlenecked on other things. Of course, of course. But it, it just, like, happens 10X faster. For sure, yeah. Which is a huge deal. And that also, like, helps the next thing, which makes, gives you 100X sp- sp- speed up happen sooner, et cetera. Um- Yeah, I'm happy to stick with longer on that one. And what's, what's, uh, what's, like, the crux? Uh, like, my capacity to absorb information and make the, like, Bayesian optimal- Yeah ... decision on the next experiment. Yeah, makes sense. Makes sense. Yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm assuming that, like, you can delegate some of this to the AI. So, like- Mm ... the AI is becoming decent at, like, deciding, you know, it run this experiment, it got this result, it runs, like, the next experiment. And then if it can run, like, two or three experiments in a row without, like, crashing, then, like, that is actually big update in, like, uplift."

Source: Dwarkesh Patel · Sep 11, 2026 · 144s clip