I’ve been arguing for 2027-ish AGI for several years now. I do somewhat fall into the annoying category of refusing to give my full details for believing this (publicly). I’ve had some more in-depth discussions about this privately.
One argument I have been making publicly is that I think Ajeya’s Bioanchors report greatly overestimated human brain compute. I think a more careful reading of Joe Carlsmith’s report that hers was based on supports my own estimates of around 1e15 FLOPs.
Another very relevant point is that recent research on the human connectome shows that long-range connections (particularly between regions of the cortex) are lower bandwidth than was previously thought. Examining this bandwidth in detail leads me to believe that efficient decentralized training should be possible. Even with considering that training a human brain equivalent model would require 10000x parallel brain equivalents to have a reasonable training time, the current levels of internet bandwidth between datacenters worldwide should be more than sufficient.
Thus, my beliefs are strongly pointint towards: “with the right algorithms we will have more than good enough hardware and more than sufficient data. Also, those algorithms are available to be found, and are hinted at by existing neuroscience data.” Thus, with AI R&D accelerated research on algorithms, we should expect rapid progress on peak capabilities and efficiency which doesn’t plateau at human-peak-capability or human-operation-speed. Super-fast and super-smart AGI within a few months of full AGI, and rapidly increasing speeds of progress leading up to AGI.
If I’m correct, then the period of time from 2026 to 2027 will contain as much progress on generally intelligent systems as all of history leading up to 2026. ASI will thus be possible before 2028.
Only social factors (e.g. massively destructive war or unprecedented international collaboration on enforcing an AI pause) will change these timelines.
I’ve been arguing for 2027-ish AGI for several years now. I do somewhat fall into the annoying category of refusing to give my full details for believing this (publicly). I’ve had some more in-depth discussions about this privately.
One argument I have been making publicly is that I think Ajeya’s Bioanchors report greatly overestimated human brain compute. I think a more careful reading of Joe Carlsmith’s report that hers was based on supports my own estimates of around 1e15 FLOPs.
Connor Leahy makes some points I agree with in his recent Future of Life interview. https://futureoflife.org/podcast/connor-leahy-on-why-humanity-risks-extinction-from-agi/
Another very relevant point is that recent research on the human connectome shows that long-range connections (particularly between regions of the cortex) are lower bandwidth than was previously thought. Examining this bandwidth in detail leads me to believe that efficient decentralized training should be possible. Even with considering that training a human brain equivalent model would require 10000x parallel brain equivalents to have a reasonable training time, the current levels of internet bandwidth between datacenters worldwide should be more than sufficient.
Thus, my beliefs are strongly pointint towards: “with the right algorithms we will have more than good enough hardware and more than sufficient data. Also, those algorithms are available to be found, and are hinted at by existing neuroscience data.” Thus, with AI R&D accelerated research on algorithms, we should expect rapid progress on peak capabilities and efficiency which doesn’t plateau at human-peak-capability or human-operation-speed. Super-fast and super-smart AGI within a few months of full AGI, and rapidly increasing speeds of progress leading up to AGI.
If I’m correct, then the period of time from 2026 to 2027 will contain as much progress on generally intelligent systems as all of history leading up to 2026. ASI will thus be possible before 2028.
Only social factors (e.g. massively destructive war or unprecedented international collaboration on enforcing an AI pause) will change these timelines.
Further thoughts here: A path to human autonomy