I haven’t thought about it that carefully but Ajeya’s paragraph sounds reasonable to me. Intuitively, I feel more pessimistic about medical diagnosis (because of regulations, not because of limitations of AI) and more optimistic about AI copy-editors (in particular I think they’ll probably be quite helpful for argument construction). I’m not totally sure what she means about AIs finding good hyperparameter settings for other AIs; under the naive interpretation that’s been here for ages (e.g. population-based training or Bayesian optimization or gradient-based hyperparameter optimization or just plain old grid search).
I’d expect this all to be at “startup-level” scale, where the AI systems still make errors (like, 0.1-50% chance) that startups are willing to bear but larger tech companies are not. For reference, I’d classify Copilot as “startup-level” but probably doesn’t yet meet the bar in Ajeya’s paragraph (though I’m not sure, I haven’t played around with it). If we’re instead asking for more robust AI systems, I’d probably add another 5ish years on that to get to 2030.
High uncertainty on all of these. By far the biggest factor determining my forecast is “how much effort are people going to put into this”; e.g. if we didn’t get good AI copy-editors by 2030 my best explanation is “no competent organization tried to do it”. Probably many of them could be done today by a company smaller than OpenAI (but with similar levels of expertise and similar access to funding).
But she thinks it’ll probably take till around 2050 for us to get transformative AI, and (I think?) AGI as well.
I’m similar on TAI, and want to know what you mean by AGI before giving a number for that.
Ajeya describes a “virtual professional” and says it would count as TAI; some of the criteria in the virtual professional definition are superhuman speed and subhuman cost. I think a rough definition of AGI would be “The virtual professional, except not necessarily fast and cheap.” How does that sound as a definition?
What do you think about chatbots? Do you think sometime in the twenties:
--A billion people will talk to a chatbot every day for fun / friendship (as opposed to Alexa-style assistant stuff)
--At least ten people you know will regularly talk to chatbots for fun
What about self-driving cars? Do you think they’ll happen in the twenties?
What about AI-powered prediction markets and forecasting tournament winners?
Ajeya describes a “virtual professional” and says it would count as TAI; some of the criteria in the virtual professional definition are superhuman speed and subhuman cost. I think a rough definition of AGI would be “The virtual professional, except not necessarily fast and cheap.” How does that sound as a definition?
I’m assuming it also has to be a “single system” (rather than e.g. taking instructions and sending them off to a CAIS-like distributed network of AI systems that then do the thing). We may not build AGI as defined here, but if we instead talk about when we could build it (at reasonable expense and speed), I’d probably put that around or a bit later than the TAI estimate, so 2050 seems like a reasonable number.
Hmm, a billion users who use it nearly every day is quite a lot. I feel like just from a reference class of “how many technologies have a billion users who use it every day” I’d have to give a low probability on that one.
Google Search has 5.4 billion searches per day, which is a majority of the market; so I’m not sure if web search has a billion users who use it nearly every day.
Social media as a general category does seem to have > 1 billion users who use it every day (e.g. Facebook has > 2 billion “daily active users”).
On the other hand, Internet access and usage is increasing, e.g. the most viewed YouTube video today probably has an order of magnitude more views than the most viewed video 8 years ago. Also, it seems not totally crazy for chatbots to significantly replace social media, such that “number of people who use social media” is the right thing to be thinking about.
Still, overall I’d guess no, we probably won’t have a billion people talking to a chatbot every day. Will we have a chatbot that’s fun to talk to? Probably.
At least ten people you know will regularly talk to chatbots for fun
That seems quite a bit more likely, I think I do expect that to happen (especially since I know lots of people who want to keep up-to-date with AI, e.g. I know a couple of people who use GPT-3 for fun).
What about AI-powered prediction markets and forecasting tournament winners?
I don’t know what you mean by this. We already use statistics to forecast tournament winners, and we already have algorithms that can operate on markets (including prediction markets when that’s allowed). So I’m not sure what change from the status quo you’re suggesting.
When it comes to medical diagnosis, I agree that the regulations will slow the adoption rate in the U.S. But then there is China. The Chinese government can collect and share huge amounts of data with less worry about privacy. And looking at the authors of ML papers, you cannot miss Chinese names (though some are U.S.-based, of course).
Your statement about AI copy editors is definitely true (I have some first-hand knowledge about what’s possible but not yet publicly available).
I haven’t thought about it that carefully but Ajeya’s paragraph sounds reasonable to me. Intuitively, I feel more pessimistic about medical diagnosis (because of regulations, not because of limitations of AI) and more optimistic about AI copy-editors (in particular I think they’ll probably be quite helpful for argument construction). I’m not totally sure what she means about AIs finding good hyperparameter settings for other AIs; under the naive interpretation that’s been here for ages (e.g. population-based training or Bayesian optimization or gradient-based hyperparameter optimization or just plain old grid search).
I’d expect this all to be at “startup-level” scale, where the AI systems still make errors (like, 0.1-50% chance) that startups are willing to bear but larger tech companies are not. For reference, I’d classify Copilot as “startup-level” but probably doesn’t yet meet the bar in Ajeya’s paragraph (though I’m not sure, I haven’t played around with it). If we’re instead asking for more robust AI systems, I’d probably add another 5ish years on that to get to 2030.
High uncertainty on all of these. By far the biggest factor determining my forecast is “how much effort are people going to put into this”; e.g. if we didn’t get good AI copy-editors by 2030 my best explanation is “no competent organization tried to do it”. Probably many of them could be done today by a company smaller than OpenAI (but with similar levels of expertise and similar access to funding).
I’m similar on TAI, and want to know what you mean by AGI before giving a number for that.
Nice, thanks!
Ajeya describes a “virtual professional” and says it would count as TAI; some of the criteria in the virtual professional definition are superhuman speed and subhuman cost. I think a rough definition of AGI would be “The virtual professional, except not necessarily fast and cheap.” How does that sound as a definition?
What do you think about chatbots? Do you think sometime in the twenties:
--A billion people will talk to a chatbot every day for fun / friendship (as opposed to Alexa-style assistant stuff)
--At least ten people you know will regularly talk to chatbots for fun
What about self-driving cars? Do you think they’ll happen in the twenties?
What about AI-powered prediction markets and forecasting tournament winners?
I’m assuming it also has to be a “single system” (rather than e.g. taking instructions and sending them off to a CAIS-like distributed network of AI systems that then do the thing). We may not build AGI as defined here, but if we instead talk about when we could build it (at reasonable expense and speed), I’d probably put that around or a bit later than the TAI estimate, so 2050 seems like a reasonable number.
Hmm, a billion users who use it nearly every day is quite a lot. I feel like just from a reference class of “how many technologies have a billion users who use it every day” I’d have to give a low probability on that one.
Google Search has 5.4 billion searches per day, which is a majority of the market; so I’m not sure if web search has a billion users who use it nearly every day.
Social media as a general category does seem to have > 1 billion users who use it every day (e.g. Facebook has > 2 billion “daily active users”).
On the other hand, Internet access and usage is increasing, e.g. the most viewed YouTube video today probably has an order of magnitude more views than the most viewed video 8 years ago. Also, it seems not totally crazy for chatbots to significantly replace social media, such that “number of people who use social media” is the right thing to be thinking about.
Still, overall I’d guess no, we probably won’t have a billion people talking to a chatbot every day. Will we have a chatbot that’s fun to talk to? Probably.
That seems quite a bit more likely, I think I do expect that to happen (especially since I know lots of people who want to keep up-to-date with AI, e.g. I know a couple of people who use GPT-3 for fun).
I don’t know what you mean by this. We already use statistics to forecast tournament winners, and we already have algorithms that can operate on markets (including prediction markets when that’s allowed). So I’m not sure what change from the status quo you’re suggesting.
Yeah, fair enough, a billion is a lot & some of my questions were a bit too poorly specified. Thanks for the answers!
When it comes to medical diagnosis, I agree that the regulations will slow the adoption rate in the U.S. But then there is China. The Chinese government can collect and share huge amounts of data with less worry about privacy. And looking at the authors of ML papers, you cannot miss Chinese names (though some are U.S.-based, of course).
Your statement about AI copy editors is definitely true (I have some first-hand knowledge about what’s possible but not yet publicly available).
Yeah, I’m just talking about the US and probably also Europe for the medical diagnosis part. I don’t have a strong view on what will happen in China.