I tentatively remain dismissive of this argument. My claim was never “AIs are actually reliable and safe now” such that your lived experience would contradict it. I too predicted that AIs would be unreliable and risky in the near-term. My prediction is that after the intelligence explosion the best AIs will be reliable and safe (insofar as they want to be, that is.)
...I guess just now I was responding to a hypothetical interlocutor who agrees that AI R&D automation could come soon but thinks that that doesn’t count as “actual impacts in the world.” I’ve met many such people, people who think that software-only singularity is unlikely, people who like to talk about real-world bottlenecks, etc. But you weren’t describing such a person, you were describing someone who also thinks we won’t be able to automate AI R&D for a long time.
There I’d say… well, we’ll see. I agree that AIs are unreliable and risky and that therefore they’ll be able to do impressive-seeming stuff that looks like they could automate AI R&D well before they actually automate AI R&D in practice. But… probably by the end of 2025 they’ll be hitting that first milestone (imagine e.g. an AI that crushes RE-Bench and also can autonomously research & write ML papers, except the ML papers are often buggy and almost always banal / unimportant, and the experiments done to make them had a lot of bugs and wasted compute, and thus AI companies would laugh at the suggestion of putting said AI in charge of a bunch of GPUs and telling it to cook.) And then two years later maybe they’ll be able to do it for real, reliably, in practice, such that AGI takeoff happens.
Maybe another thing I’d say is “One domain where AIs seem to be heavily used in practice, is coding, especially coding at frontier AI companies (according to friends who work at these companies and report fairly heavy usage). This suggests that AI R&D automation will happen more or less on schedule.”
I’m not talking about narrowly your claim; I just think this very fundamentally confuses most people’s basic models of the world. People expect, from their unspoken models of “how technological products improve,” that long before you get a mind-bendingly powerful product that’s so good it can easily kill you, you get something that’s at least a little useful to you (and then you get something that’s a little more useful to you, and then something that’s really useful to you, and so on). And in fact that is roughly how it’s working — for programmers, not for a lot of other people.
Because I’ve engaged so much with the conceptual case for an intelligence explosion (i.e. the case that this intuitive model of technology might be wrong), I roughly buy it even though I am getting almost no use out of AIs still. But I have a huge amount of personal sympathy for people who feel really gaslit by it all.
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.)
I tentatively remain dismissive of this argument. My claim was never “AIs are actually reliable and safe now” such that your lived experience would contradict it. I too predicted that AIs would be unreliable and risky in the near-term. My prediction is that after the intelligence explosion the best AIs will be reliable and safe (insofar as they want to be, that is.)
...I guess just now I was responding to a hypothetical interlocutor who agrees that AI R&D automation could come soon but thinks that that doesn’t count as “actual impacts in the world.” I’ve met many such people, people who think that software-only singularity is unlikely, people who like to talk about real-world bottlenecks, etc. But you weren’t describing such a person, you were describing someone who also thinks we won’t be able to automate AI R&D for a long time.
There I’d say… well, we’ll see. I agree that AIs are unreliable and risky and that therefore they’ll be able to do impressive-seeming stuff that looks like they could automate AI R&D well before they actually automate AI R&D in practice. But… probably by the end of 2025 they’ll be hitting that first milestone (imagine e.g. an AI that crushes RE-Bench and also can autonomously research & write ML papers, except the ML papers are often buggy and almost always banal / unimportant, and the experiments done to make them had a lot of bugs and wasted compute, and thus AI companies would laugh at the suggestion of putting said AI in charge of a bunch of GPUs and telling it to cook.) And then two years later maybe they’ll be able to do it for real, reliably, in practice, such that AGI takeoff happens.
Maybe another thing I’d say is “One domain where AIs seem to be heavily used in practice, is coding, especially coding at frontier AI companies (according to friends who work at these companies and report fairly heavy usage). This suggests that AI R&D automation will happen more or less on schedule.”
I’m not talking about narrowly your claim; I just think this very fundamentally confuses most people’s basic models of the world. People expect, from their unspoken models of “how technological products improve,” that long before you get a mind-bendingly powerful product that’s so good it can easily kill you, you get something that’s at least a little useful to you (and then you get something that’s a little more useful to you, and then something that’s really useful to you, and so on). And in fact that is roughly how it’s working — for programmers, not for a lot of other people.
Because I’ve engaged so much with the conceptual case for an intelligence explosion (i.e. the case that this intuitive model of technology might be wrong), I roughly buy it even though I am getting almost no use out of AIs still. But I have a huge amount of personal sympathy for people who feel really gaslit by it all.
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.)