So, I’ve been focusing on giving more of a generic view in my comments. Something that I think someone with similar background in neuroscience, and similar background in ML would endorse as roughly plausible.
I also have an inside view which says more specific things. Like, I don’t just vaguely think that there are probably some fruitful directions in neglected parts of computer science history and in recent neuroscience. What I actually have are specific hypotheses that I’ve been working hard on trying to code up experiments for.
If someone gave me engineering support and compute sufficient to actually get my currently planned experiments run, and the results looked like dead-ends, I think my timelines would go from 2-3 years out to 5-10 years. I’d also be much less confident that we’d see rapid efficiency and capability gains from algorithmic research post-AGI, because I’d be more in mindset of minor tweaks to existing paradigms and further expensive scaling.
This is why I’m basically thinking that I mostly agree with you, Thane, except for this inside view I have about specific approaches I think are currently neglected but unlikely to stay neglected.
So, I’ve been focusing on giving more of a generic view in my comments. Something that I think someone with similar background in neuroscience, and similar background in ML would endorse as roughly plausible.
I also have an inside view which says more specific things. Like, I don’t just vaguely think that there are probably some fruitful directions in neglected parts of computer science history and in recent neuroscience. What I actually have are specific hypotheses that I’ve been working hard on trying to code up experiments for.
If someone gave me engineering support and compute sufficient to actually get my currently planned experiments run, and the results looked like dead-ends, I think my timelines would go from 2-3 years out to 5-10 years. I’d also be much less confident that we’d see rapid efficiency and capability gains from algorithmic research post-AGI, because I’d be more in mindset of minor tweaks to existing paradigms and further expensive scaling.
This is why I’m basically thinking that I mostly agree with you, Thane, except for this inside view I have about specific approaches I think are currently neglected but unlikely to stay neglected.