Lambda

Here is Patrick McKenzie: I have decided since no one popularized word yet: lambda is the general factor of performance above SOTA LLM baseline. Notes: I am primarily posting this because a term for this is so useful inter- and interpersonally. Wins over replacement is a pretty good analogy for this, but the replacement-level players are becoming arbitrarily numerous and inexpensive. None of this is to say that lambda is the only way to evaluate one's skills. Organizations will use sub-LLM-level outputs for a long time, and of course there are all sorts of reasons to value one's abilities that have little to do with an LLM baseline. (I enjoy studying for trivia competitions very much, and I will forever be much worse than computers at them.) The wins-over-replacement metaphor suggests that doubling one's lambda might be much more than twice as economically valuable; a 2*N-win player's open-market salary is generally more than twice that of an N-win player.1 For any given (positive)…