To put it another way: we probably both agree that if we had gotten AI personal assistants that shop for you and book meetings for you in 2024, that would have been at least some evidence for shorter timelines. So their absence is at least some evidence for longer timelines. The question is what your underlying causal model was: did you think that if we were going to get superintelligence by 2027, then we really should see personal assistants in 2024? A lot of people strongly believe that, you (Daniel) hardly believe it at all, and I’m somewhere in the middle.
If we had gotten both the personal assistants I was expecting, and the 2x faster benchmark progress than I was expecting, my timelines would be the same as yours are now.
That’s reasonable. Seems worth mentioning that I did make predictions in What 2026 Looks Like, and eyeballing them now I don’t think I was saying that we’d have personal assistants that shop for you and book meetings for you in 2024, at least not in a way that really works. (I say at the beginning of 2026 “The age of the AI assistant has finally dawned.”) In other words I think even in 2021 I was thinking that widespread actually useful AI assistants would happen about a year or two before superintelligence. (Not because I have opinions about the orderings of technologies in general, but because I think that once an AGI company has had a popular working personal assistant for two years they should be able to figure out how to make a better version that dramatically speeds up their R&D.)
To put it another way: we probably both agree that if we had gotten AI personal assistants that shop for you and book meetings for you in 2024, that would have been at least some evidence for shorter timelines. So their absence is at least some evidence for longer timelines. The question is what your underlying causal model was: did you think that if we were going to get superintelligence by 2027, then we really should see personal assistants in 2024? A lot of people strongly believe that, you (Daniel) hardly believe it at all, and I’m somewhere in the middle.
If we had gotten both the personal assistants I was expecting, and the 2x faster benchmark progress than I was expecting, my timelines would be the same as yours are now.
That’s reasonable. Seems worth mentioning that I did make predictions in What 2026 Looks Like, and eyeballing them now I don’t think I was saying that we’d have personal assistants that shop for you and book meetings for you in 2024, at least not in a way that really works. (I say at the beginning of 2026 “The age of the AI assistant has finally dawned.”) In other words I think even in 2021 I was thinking that widespread actually useful AI assistants would happen about a year or two before superintelligence. (Not because I have opinions about the orderings of technologies in general, but because I think that once an AGI company has had a popular working personal assistant for two years they should be able to figure out how to make a better version that dramatically speeds up their R&D.)