A counter hypothesis I’ve heard (not original to me) is: With 50% probability, we will be half-way through the AI researcher-years required to get AGI.
I think this suggests much shorter timelines, as most researchers have been doing research in the last ~10 years.
It’s not clear to me what reference class makes sense here though. Like, I feel like 50% doesn’t make any sense. It implies that for all outstanding AI problems we’re fifty percent there. We’re 50% of the way to a rat brain, to a human emulation, to a vastly superintelligent AGI, etc. It’s not a clearly natural category for a field to be “done”, and it’s not clear which thing counts as ”done” in this particular field.
I was looking at the NIPS growth numbers last June and I made a joke:
AI researcher anthropics: ‘researchers [should] tend to think AI is ~20 years away because given exponential growth of researchers & careers of ~30 years, the final generation of researchers will make up a majority of all researchers, hence, by SSA+Outside View, one must assume 20 years.’
(Of course, I’m making a rather carbon-chauvinistic assumption here that it’s only human researchers/researcher-years which matter.)
A counter hypothesis I’ve heard (not original to me) is: With 50% probability, we will be half-way through the AI researcher-years required to get AGI.
I think this suggests much shorter timelines, as most researchers have been doing research in the last ~10 years.
It’s not clear to me what reference class makes sense here though. Like, I feel like 50% doesn’t make any sense. It implies that for all outstanding AI problems we’re fifty percent there. We’re 50% of the way to a rat brain, to a human emulation, to a vastly superintelligent AGI, etc. It’s not a clearly natural category for a field to be “done”, and it’s not clear which thing counts as ”done” in this particular field.
I was looking at the NIPS growth numbers last June and I made a joke:
(Of course, I’m making a rather carbon-chauvinistic assumption here that it’s only human researchers/researcher-years which matter.)