Re: your other interventions—I meant for these to be part of the “Standards and monitoring” category of interventions (my discussion of that mentions advocacy and external pressure as important factors).
I think it’s far from obvious that an AI company needs to be a force against regulation, both conceptually (if it affects all players, it doesn’t necessarily hurt the company) and empirically.
Thanks for giving your take on the size of speedup effects. I disagree on a number of fronts. I don’t want to get into the details of most of them, but will comment that it seems like a big leap from “X product was released N months earlier than otherwise” to “Transformative AI will now arrive N months earlier than otherwise.” (I think this feels fairly clear when looking at other technological breakthroughs and how much they would’ve been affected by differently timed product releases.)
I meant for these to be part of the “Standards and monitoring” category of interventions (my discussion of that mentions advocacy and external pressure as important factors).
I see, I guess where we might disagree is I think that IMO a productive social movement could want to apply the Henry Spira’s playbook (overall pretty adversarial) oriented mostly towards slowing things down until labs have a clue of what they’re doing on the alignment front. I would guess you wouldn’t agree with that, but I’m not sure.
I think it’s far from obvious that an AI company needs to be a force against regulation, both conceptually (if it affects all players, it doesn’t necessarily hurt the company) and empirically.
I’m not saying that it would be a force against regulation in general but that it would be a force against any regulation which slows down substantially the current capabilities progress rate of labs. And empirics don’t demonstrate the opposite as far as I can tell.
Labs have been pushing for the rule that we should wait for evals to say “it’s dangerous” before we consider what to do, rather than do like in most other industries, i.e. that something is assumed dangerous until proven safe.
Most mentions of slowdown have been described as necessary potentially at some point in the distant future, while most people in those labs have <5y timelines.
Finally, on your conceptual part, as some argued, it’s in fact probably not possible to affect all players equally without a drastic regime of control (which is a true downside of slowing down now, but IMO still much less worse than slowing down once a leak or a jailbreak of an advanced system can cause a large-scale engineered pandemic) bc smaller actors will use the time to try to catch up as close as possible from the frontier.
will comment that it seems like a big leap from “X product was released N months earlier than otherwise” to “Transformative AI will now arrive N months earlier than otherwise.”
I agree, but if anything, my sense is that due to various compound effects (due to AI accelerating AI, to investment, to increased compute demand, and to more talent earlier), an earlier product release of N months just gives a lower bound for TAI timelines shortening (hence greater than N). Moreover, I think that the ChatGPT product release is, ex-post at least, not in the typical product release reference class. It was clearly a massive game changer for OpenAI and the entire ecosystem.
I see, I guess where we might disagree is I think that IMO a productive social movement could want to apply the Henry Spira’s playbook (overall pretty adversarial) oriented mostly towards slowing things down until labs have a clue of what they’re doing on the alignment front. I would guess you wouldn’t agree with that, but I’m not sure.
I think an adversarial social movement could have a positive impact. I have tended to think of the impact as mostly being about getting risks taken more seriously and thus creating more political will for “standards and monitoring,” but you’re right that there could also be benefits simply from buying time generically for other stuff.
I’m not saying that it would be a force against regulation in general but that it would be a force against any regulation which slows down substantially the current capabilities progress rate of labs. And empirics don’t demonstrate the opposite as far as I can tell.
I said it’s “far from obvious” empirically what’s going on. I agree that discussion of slowing down has focused on the future rather than now, but I don’t think it has been pointing to a specific time horizon (the vibe looks to me more like “slow down at a certain capabilities level”).
Finally, on your conceptual part, as some argued, it’s in fact probably not possible to affect all players equally without a drastic regime of control (which is a true downside of slowing down now, but IMO still much less worse than slowing down once a leak or a jailbreak of an advanced system can cause a large-scale engineered pandemic) bc smaller actors will use the time to try to catch up as close as possible from the frontier.
It’s true that no regulation will affect everyone precisely the same way. But there is plenty of precedent for major industry players supporting regulation that generally slows things down (even when the dynamic you’re describing applies).
I agree, but if anything, my sense is that due to various compound effects (due to AI accelerating AI, to investment, to increased compute demand, and to more talent earlier), an earlier product release of N months just gives a lower bound for TAI timelines shortening (hence greater than N). Moreover, I think that the ChatGPT product release is, ex-post at least, not in the typical product release reference class. It was clearly a massive game changer for OpenAI and the entire ecosystem.
I don’t agree that we are looking at a lower bound here, bearing in mind that (I think) we are just talking about when ChatGPT was released (not when the underlying technology was developed), and that (I think) we should be holding fixed the release timing of GPT-4. (What I’ve seen in the NYT seems to imply that they rushed out functionality they’d otherwise have bundled with GPT-4.)
If ChatGPT had been held for longer, then:
Scaling and research would have continued in the meantime. And even with investment and talent flooding in, I expect that there’s very disproportionate impact from players who were already active before ChatGPT came out, who were easily well capitalized enough to go at ~max speed for the few months between ChatGPT and GPT-4.
GPT-4 would have had the same absolute level of impressiveness, revenue potential, etc. (as would some other things that I think have been important factors in bringing in investment, such as Midjourney). You could have a model like “ChatGPT maxed out hype such that the bottleneck on money and talent rushing into the field became calendar time alone,” which would support your picture; but you could also have other models, e.g. where the level of investment is more like a function of the absolute level of visible AI capabilities such that the timing of ChatGPT mattered little, holding fixed the timing of GPT-4. I’d guess the right model is somewhere in between those two; in particular, I’d guess that it matters a lot how high revenue is from various sources, and revenue seems to behave somewhere in between these two things (there are calendar-time bottlenecks, but absolute capabilities matter a lot too; and parallel progress on image generation seems important here as well.)
Attention from policymakers would’ve been more delayed; the more hopeful you are about slowing things via regulation, the more you should think of this as an offsetting factor, especially since regulation may be more of a pure “calendar-time-bottlenecked response to hype” model than research and scaling progress.
(I also am not sure I understand your point for why it could be more than 3 months of speedup. All the factors you name seem like they will nearly-inevitably happen somewhere between here and TAI—e.g., there will be releases and demos that galvanize investment, talent, etc. - so it’s not clear how speeding a bunch of these things up 3 months speeds the whole thing up more than 3 months, assuming that there will be enough time for these things to matter either way.)
But more important than any of these points is that circumstances have (unfortunately, IMO) changed. My take on the “successful, careful AI lab” intervention was quite a bit more negative in mid-2022 (when I worried about exactly the kind of acceleration effects you point to) than when I did my writing on this topic in 2023 (at which point ChatGPT had already been released and the marginal further speedup of this kind of thing seemed a lot lower). Since I wrote this post, it seems like the marginal downsides have continued to fall, although I do remain ambivalent.
Thanks for the response!
Re: your other interventions—I meant for these to be part of the “Standards and monitoring” category of interventions (my discussion of that mentions advocacy and external pressure as important factors).
I think it’s far from obvious that an AI company needs to be a force against regulation, both conceptually (if it affects all players, it doesn’t necessarily hurt the company) and empirically.
Thanks for giving your take on the size of speedup effects. I disagree on a number of fronts. I don’t want to get into the details of most of them, but will comment that it seems like a big leap from “X product was released N months earlier than otherwise” to “Transformative AI will now arrive N months earlier than otherwise.” (I think this feels fairly clear when looking at other technological breakthroughs and how much they would’ve been affected by differently timed product releases.)
I see, I guess where we might disagree is I think that IMO a productive social movement could want to apply the Henry Spira’s playbook (overall pretty adversarial) oriented mostly towards slowing things down until labs have a clue of what they’re doing on the alignment front. I would guess you wouldn’t agree with that, but I’m not sure.
I’m not saying that it would be a force against regulation in general but that it would be a force against any regulation which slows down substantially the current capabilities progress rate of labs. And empirics don’t demonstrate the opposite as far as I can tell.
Labs have been pushing for the rule that we should wait for evals to say “it’s dangerous” before we consider what to do, rather than do like in most other industries, i.e. that something is assumed dangerous until proven safe.
Most mentions of slowdown have been described as necessary potentially at some point in the distant future, while most people in those labs have <5y timelines.
Finally, on your conceptual part, as some argued, it’s in fact probably not possible to affect all players equally without a drastic regime of control (which is a true downside of slowing down now, but IMO still much less worse than slowing down once a leak or a jailbreak of an advanced system can cause a large-scale engineered pandemic) bc smaller actors will use the time to try to catch up as close as possible from the frontier.
I agree, but if anything, my sense is that due to various compound effects (due to AI accelerating AI, to investment, to increased compute demand, and to more talent earlier), an earlier product release of N months just gives a lower bound for TAI timelines shortening (hence greater than N). Moreover, I think that the ChatGPT product release is, ex-post at least, not in the typical product release reference class. It was clearly a massive game changer for OpenAI and the entire ecosystem.
(Apologies for slow reply!)
I think an adversarial social movement could have a positive impact. I have tended to think of the impact as mostly being about getting risks taken more seriously and thus creating more political will for “standards and monitoring,” but you’re right that there could also be benefits simply from buying time generically for other stuff.
I said it’s “far from obvious” empirically what’s going on. I agree that discussion of slowing down has focused on the future rather than now, but I don’t think it has been pointing to a specific time horizon (the vibe looks to me more like “slow down at a certain capabilities level”).
It’s true that no regulation will affect everyone precisely the same way. But there is plenty of precedent for major industry players supporting regulation that generally slows things down (even when the dynamic you’re describing applies).
I don’t agree that we are looking at a lower bound here, bearing in mind that (I think) we are just talking about when ChatGPT was released (not when the underlying technology was developed), and that (I think) we should be holding fixed the release timing of GPT-4. (What I’ve seen in the NYT seems to imply that they rushed out functionality they’d otherwise have bundled with GPT-4.)
If ChatGPT had been held for longer, then:
Scaling and research would have continued in the meantime. And even with investment and talent flooding in, I expect that there’s very disproportionate impact from players who were already active before ChatGPT came out, who were easily well capitalized enough to go at ~max speed for the few months between ChatGPT and GPT-4.
GPT-4 would have had the same absolute level of impressiveness, revenue potential, etc. (as would some other things that I think have been important factors in bringing in investment, such as Midjourney). You could have a model like “ChatGPT maxed out hype such that the bottleneck on money and talent rushing into the field became calendar time alone,” which would support your picture; but you could also have other models, e.g. where the level of investment is more like a function of the absolute level of visible AI capabilities such that the timing of ChatGPT mattered little, holding fixed the timing of GPT-4. I’d guess the right model is somewhere in between those two; in particular, I’d guess that it matters a lot how high revenue is from various sources, and revenue seems to behave somewhere in between these two things (there are calendar-time bottlenecks, but absolute capabilities matter a lot too; and parallel progress on image generation seems important here as well.)
Attention from policymakers would’ve been more delayed; the more hopeful you are about slowing things via regulation, the more you should think of this as an offsetting factor, especially since regulation may be more of a pure “calendar-time-bottlenecked response to hype” model than research and scaling progress.
(I also am not sure I understand your point for why it could be more than 3 months of speedup. All the factors you name seem like they will nearly-inevitably happen somewhere between here and TAI—e.g., there will be releases and demos that galvanize investment, talent, etc. - so it’s not clear how speeding a bunch of these things up 3 months speeds the whole thing up more than 3 months, assuming that there will be enough time for these things to matter either way.)
But more important than any of these points is that circumstances have (unfortunately, IMO) changed. My take on the “successful, careful AI lab” intervention was quite a bit more negative in mid-2022 (when I worried about exactly the kind of acceleration effects you point to) than when I did my writing on this topic in 2023 (at which point ChatGPT had already been released and the marginal further speedup of this kind of thing seemed a lot lower). Since I wrote this post, it seems like the marginal downsides have continued to fall, although I do remain ambivalent.