I came across this old Metaculus question, which confirms my memory of how my timelines changed over time:
30% by 2040 at first, then march 2020 I updated to 40%, then Aug 2020 I updated to 71%, then I went down a bit, and then now it’s up to 85%. It’s hard to get higher than 85% because the future is so uncertain; there are all sorts of catastrophes etc. that could happen to derail AI progress.
What caused the big jump in mid-2020 was sitting down to actually calculate my timelines in earnest. I ended up converging on something like the Bio Anchors framework, but with a lot less mass in the we-need-about-as-much-compute-as-evolution-used-to-evolve-life-on-earth region. That mass was instead in the holy-crap-we-are-within-6-OOMs region, probably because of GPT-3 and the scaling hypothesis. My basic position hasn’t changed much since then, just become incrementally more confident as more evidence has rolled in & as I’ve heard the counterarguments and been dissatisfied by them.
I came across this old Metaculus question, which confirms my memory of how my timelines changed over time:
30% by 2040 at first, then march 2020 I updated to 40%, then Aug 2020 I updated to 71%, then I went down a bit, and then now it’s up to 85%. It’s hard to get higher than 85% because the future is so uncertain; there are all sorts of catastrophes etc. that could happen to derail AI progress.
What caused the big jump in mid-2020 was sitting down to actually calculate my timelines in earnest. I ended up converging on something like the Bio Anchors framework, but with a lot less mass in the we-need-about-as-much-compute-as-evolution-used-to-evolve-life-on-earth region. That mass was instead in the holy-crap-we-are-within-6-OOMs region, probably because of GPT-3 and the scaling hypothesis. My basic position hasn’t changed much since then, just become incrementally more confident as more evidence has rolled in & as I’ve heard the counterarguments and been dissatisfied by them.