Some ideas for definitions of AGI / resolution criteria for the purpose of herding a bunch of cats / superforecasters into making predictions:
(1) Drop-in replacement for human remote worker circa 2023 (h/t Ajeya Cotra):
When will it first be the case that there exists an AI system which, if teleported back in time to 2023, would be able to function as a drop-in replacement for a human remote-working professional, across all* industries / jobs / etc.? So in particular, it can serve as a programmer, as a manager, as a writer, as an advisor, etc. and perform at (say) 90%th percentile or higher at any such role, and moreover the cost to run the system would be less than the hourly cost to employ a 90th percentile human worker.
(Exception to the ALL: Let’s exclude industries/jobs/etc. where being a human is somehow important to one’s ability to perform the job; e.g. maybe therapy bots are inherently disadvantaged because people will trust them less than real humans; e.g. maybe the same goes for some things like HR or whatever. But importantly, this is not the case for anything actually key to performing AI research—designing experiments, coding, analyzing experimental results, etc. (the bread and butter of OpenAI) are central examples of the sorts of tasks we very much want to include in the “ALL.”)
(2) Capable of beating All Humans in the following toy hypothetical:
Suppose that all nations in the world enacted and enforced laws that prevented any AIs developed after year X from being used by any corporation other than AICORP. Meanwhile, they enacted and enforced laws that grant special legal status to AICORP: It cannot have human employees or advisors, and must instead be managed/CEO’d/etc. only by AI systems. It can still contract humans to do menial labor for it, but the humans have to be overseen by AI systems. The purpose is to prevent any humans from being involved in high-level decisionmaking, or in corporate R&D, or in programming.
In this hypothetical, would AI corp probably be successful and eventually become a major fraction of the economy? Or would it sputter out, flail embarrassingly, etc.? What is the first year X such that the answer is “Probably it would be successful...”?
For predicting feasible scaling investment, drop-in replacement for a significant portion of remote work that currently can only be done by humans seems important (some of which is not actually done by humans remotely). That is, an AI that can be cheaply and easily on-boarded for very small volume custom positions with minimal friction, possibly by some kind of AI on-boarding human professional. But not for any sort of rocket science or 90th percentile.
(That’s the sort of thing I worry about GPT-5 with some scaffolding turning out to be, making $50 billion training runs feasible without relying on faith in heretofore-unseen further scaling.)
Some ideas for definitions of AGI / resolution criteria for the purpose of herding a bunch of cats / superforecasters into making predictions:
(1) Drop-in replacement for human remote worker circa 2023 (h/t Ajeya Cotra):
When will it first be the case that there exists an AI system which, if teleported back in time to 2023, would be able to function as a drop-in replacement for a human remote-working professional, across all* industries / jobs / etc.? So in particular, it can serve as a programmer, as a manager, as a writer, as an advisor, etc. and perform at (say) 90%th percentile or higher at any such role, and moreover the cost to run the system would be less than the hourly cost to employ a 90th percentile human worker.
(Exception to the ALL: Let’s exclude industries/jobs/etc. where being a human is somehow important to one’s ability to perform the job; e.g. maybe therapy bots are inherently disadvantaged because people will trust them less than real humans; e.g. maybe the same goes for some things like HR or whatever. But importantly, this is not the case for anything actually key to performing AI research—designing experiments, coding, analyzing experimental results, etc. (the bread and butter of OpenAI) are central examples of the sorts of tasks we very much want to include in the “ALL.”)
(2) Capable of beating All Humans in the following toy hypothetical:
Suppose that all nations in the world enacted and enforced laws that prevented any AIs developed after year X from being used by any corporation other than AICORP. Meanwhile, they enacted and enforced laws that grant special legal status to AICORP: It cannot have human employees or advisors, and must instead be managed/CEO’d/etc. only by AI systems. It can still contract humans to do menial labor for it, but the humans have to be overseen by AI systems. The purpose is to prevent any humans from being involved in high-level decisionmaking, or in corporate R&D, or in programming.
In this hypothetical, would AI corp probably be successful and eventually become a major fraction of the economy? Or would it sputter out, flail embarrassingly, etc.? What is the first year X such that the answer is “Probably it would be successful...”?
(3) The “replace 99% of currently remote jobs” thing I used with Ajeya and Ege
(4) the Metaculus definition (the hard component of which is “2 hour adversarial turing test” https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-general-intelligence/ except instead of the judges trying to distinguish between the AI and an average human, they are trying to distinguish between a top AI researcher at a top AI lab, and the AI.
For predicting feasible scaling investment, drop-in replacement for a significant portion of remote work that currently can only be done by humans seems important (some of which is not actually done by humans remotely). That is, an AI that can be cheaply and easily on-boarded for very small volume custom positions with minimal friction, possibly by some kind of AI on-boarding human professional. But not for any sort of rocket science or 90th percentile.
(That’s the sort of thing I worry about GPT-5 with some scaffolding turning out to be, making $50 billion training runs feasible without relying on faith in heretofore-unseen further scaling.)
(I made some slight formatting edits to this, since some line-breaks looked a bit broken on my device, feel free to revert)