Link post Blog post by Alex Irpan. The basic summary:
In 2015, I made the following forecasts about when AGI could happen.
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10% chance by 2045
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50% chance by 2050
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90% chance by 2070 Now that it’s 2020, I’m updating my forecast to:
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10% chance by 2035
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50% chance by 2045
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90% chance by 2070 The main underlying shifts: more focus on improvements in tools, compute, and unsupervised learning.
Seems a bit weird to have 10% probability mass for the next 15 years followed by 40% probability mass over the subsequent 10 years. That seems to indicate a fairly strong view about how the next 20 years will go. IMO the probability of AGI in the next 15 years should be substantially higher than 10%.
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Whoa, I hadn’t noticed that. The old predictions put 40% probability on AGI being developed in a 5 year window
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That was going to be my initial comment, then I noticed that the blog post addresses that problem. Not sufficiently IMO.
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Yea this was a lot more obvious to me when I plotted visually: https://elicit.ought.org/builder/om4oCj7jm (NB: I work on Elicit and it’s still a WIP tool)
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Ahhhh this is so nice! I suspect a substantial fraction of people would revise their timelines after seeing what they look like visually. I think encouraging people to plot out their timelines is probably a pretty cost-effective intervention.
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Sounds like we could have a thread for that. The image above looks great, would be interested in seeing more comparisons like it, if they’re easy to generate using elicit.
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Yes, let’s please create a thread. If you don’t I will. Here’s mine: (Ignore the name, I can’t figure out how to change it) https://elicit.ought.org/builder/xt516PmHt
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Can you make the thread (make it a question post?) and share it with me? Then I’ll suggest any rewrites and we can publish it?
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I shared it with you and jungofthewon; maybe they could help me include some sort of instructions for how to use Elicit?
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I can help with this if you share the post with me!
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Thanks so much!
You want to change "Your Distribution" to something like "Daniel’s 2020 distribution"?
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Could you help me by writing some instructions for how to use Elicit, to be put in my question on the topic? (See discussion with Ben above)
Yes, but I don’t know how.
Is the "Your distribution" one Alex’s updated estimates, or is it your (jungofthewon’s) distribution?
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The blue distribution labeled "Your distribution" in this snapshot is Alex’s updated 2020 prediction.
I think the title is particularly confusing because it includes an "I" statement. Maybe change to: Alex Ipran: "My AI Timelines Have Sped Up"
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Changed.
If 65% of the AI improvements will come from compute alone, I find quite surprising that the post author assigns only 10% probability of AGI by 2035. By that time, we should have between 20x to 100x compute per $. And we can also easily forecast that AI training budgets will increase 1000x easily over that time, as a shot to AGI justifies the ROI. I think he is putting way too much credit on the computational performance of the human brain.