I am both an index investor and an AI enthusiast, and I think it’s an excellent analogy.
If you are an investor who does not have interest in maximizing your returns and you just want a place to park your savings, an index fund is great, and will return the market average return.
Similarly, if there is a skill that you need that is not your “special” skill, it makes sense to subscribe to the “market average” of that skill, as implemented by a statistical language model, which is in a sense “averaging” over the collective language skill of the entire internet.
In both cases, the ingredients of the “average” are formed by the people who try to do better. Active investors, including hedge funds and short sellers, think they can do better, and they provide signal that in turn feeds back into the index.
Similarly, anybody who thinks they are better at writing than the language model is free to try to outperform it, and eventually will feed back into the training data.
If you are an investor who does not have interest in maximizing your returns and you just want a place to park your savings, an index fund is great, and will return the market average return.
Similarly, if there is a skill that you need that is not your “special” skill, it makes sense to subscribe to the “market average” of that skill, as implemented by a statistical language model, which is in a sense “averaging” over the collective language skill of the entire internet.
In both cases, the ingredients of the “average” are formed by the people who try to do better. Active investors, including hedge funds and short sellers, think they can do better, and they provide signal that in turn feeds back into the index.
Similarly, anybody who thinks they are better at writing than the language model is free to try to outperform it, and eventually will feed back into the training data.