A weird fact about the world, Dominic Cummings notes, is that political research is amazingly underrated as a force which can change history:
Put another billion or ten into a normal company, little really changes in terms of world history. But just thousands wisely deployed on political research can change history. I’ve explained this at length (e.g here) and won’t rehash. Politics does not focus on the most high value tokens. People repeatedly communicate without figuring out if what they’re doing is counterproductive. They fail to do the most basic research on opponents. People fight entire election campaigns without understanding what dominates the thinking of crucial voters. People with money rarely understand politics well and don’t realise politics does not focus on the most high value tokens. So vast amounts of money is wasted on ‘campaigns’ and ‘think tanks’ while the search for the most high value tokens is unfunded. The models will affect politics partly because they will radically reduce the cost of finding high value tokens, so people with little cash won’t have to find 500k plus to do a project. The potential leverage of political teams with a very small number of able relentless people will grow enormously. This isn’t speculation, I can see it on projects I’m working on / helping with.
A conclusion from my experiments: you’re better off having the paid versions of Opus or GPT work for you than ~99% of MPs.