What I do think happened here is that the AGI term lost a lot of it’s value, because it was conflating things that didn’t need to need to be conflated, and I currently think that the AGI term is making people subtly confused in some senses.
I also think part of the issue is that we are closer to the era of AI, and we can see AI being useful more often, so the term’s nebulosity is not nearly as useful as it once was.
I like Tom Davidson’s post on the issue, and I also like some of it’s points, though I have a different timeline obviously:
My general median distribution is a combination of the following timelines (For the first scenario described below, set AGI training requirements to 1e31 and the effective flop gap to 1e3, as well as AGI runtime requirements to 1e15, plus moving the default value from 1.25 to 1.75 for returns to software):
And the second scenario has 1e33 as the amount of training compute necessary, 5e3 as the effective flop gap, and the AGI runtime requirements as still 1e15, but no other parameters are changed, and in particular the returns to software is set at 1.25 this time:
Which means my median timelines to full 100% automation are between 5-8 years, or between March 2029 and April 2032 is when automation goes in full swing.
That’s 2-5 years longer than Leopold’s estimate, but damn it’s quite short, especially since this assumes we’ve solved robotics well enough such that we can apply AI in the physical world really, really nicely.
That’s about 1-4 years longer than your estimate of when AI goes critical, as well under my median.
So it’s shorter than @jacob_cannell’s timeline, but longer than yours or @leopold’s timelines, which places me in AGI soon, but not so soon that I’d plan for skipping doing some regular work or finishing college.
Under my model, the takeoff speed lasts from 3 years to 7 years and 3 months from a government perspective from today to AGI, assuming the wakeup to 100% AGI is used as the definition of takeoff, but from a pure technical perspective, from 20% AI to 100% AI, it would be from 22 months to 2 years and 7 months.
One thing we can say is that Eliezer was wrong to claim that you could have an AI that could takeoff in hours to weeks, because compute bottlenecks do matter a lot, and they prevent the pure software singularity from happening.
So we can fairly clearly call this a win for slow takeoff views, though I do think Paul’s operationalization is wrong IMO for technical reasons.
That said, I do think this is also a loss for @RobinHanson’s views, who tend to assume way slower takeoffs and way slower timelines than Eliezer, so both parties got it deeply wrong.
What I do think happened here is that the AGI term lost a lot of it’s value, because it was conflating things that didn’t need to need to be conflated, and I currently think that the AGI term is making people subtly confused in some senses.
I also think part of the issue is that we are closer to the era of AI, and we can see AI being useful more often, so the term’s nebulosity is not nearly as useful as it once was.
I like Tom Davidson’s post on the issue, and I also like some of it’s points, though I have a different timeline obviously:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Gc9FGtdXhK9sCSEYu/what-a-compute-centric-framework-says-about-ai-takeoff
My general median distribution is a combination of the following timelines (For the first scenario described below, set AGI training requirements to 1e31 and the effective flop gap to 1e3, as well as AGI runtime requirements to 1e15, plus moving the default value from 1.25 to 1.75 for returns to software):
And the second scenario has 1e33 as the amount of training compute necessary, 5e3 as the effective flop gap, and the AGI runtime requirements as still 1e15, but no other parameters are changed, and in particular the returns to software is set at 1.25 this time:
Which means my median timelines to full 100% automation are between 5-8 years, or between March 2029 and April 2032 is when automation goes in full swing.
That’s 2-5 years longer than Leopold’s estimate, but damn it’s quite short, especially since this assumes we’ve solved robotics well enough such that we can apply AI in the physical world really, really nicely.
That’s about 1-4 years longer than your estimate of when AI goes critical, as well under my median.
So it’s shorter than @jacob_cannell’s timeline, but longer than yours or @leopold’s timelines, which places me in AGI soon, but not so soon that I’d plan for skipping doing some regular work or finishing college.
Under my model, the takeoff speed lasts from 3 years to 7 years and 3 months from a government perspective from today to AGI, assuming the wakeup to 100% AGI is used as the definition of takeoff, but from a pure technical perspective, from 20% AI to 100% AI, it would be from 22 months to 2 years and 7 months.
One thing we can say is that Eliezer was wrong to claim that you could have an AI that could takeoff in hours to weeks, because compute bottlenecks do matter a lot, and they prevent the pure software singularity from happening.
So we can fairly clearly call this a win for slow takeoff views, though I do think Paul’s operationalization is wrong IMO for technical reasons.
That said, I do think this is also a loss for @RobinHanson’s views, who tend to assume way slower takeoffs and way slower timelines than Eliezer, so both parties got it deeply wrong.