Without an intelligence explosion, it’s around 2030 that scaling through increasing funding runs out of steam and slows down to the speed of chip improvement. This slowdown happens around the same time (maybe 2028-2034) even with a lot more commercial success (if that success precedes the slowdown), because scaling faster takes exponentially more money. So there’s more probability density of transformative advances before ~2030 than after, to the extent that scaling contributes to this probability.
That’s my reason to see 2030 as a meaningful threshold, Thane Ruthenis might be pointing to it for different reasons. It seems like it should certainly be salient for AGI companies, so a long timelines argument might want to address their narrative up to 2030 as a distinct case.
Without an intelligence explosion, it’s around 2030 that scaling through increasing funding runs out of steam and slows down to the speed of chip improvement. This slowdown happens around the same time (maybe 2028-2034) even with a lot more commercial success (if that success precedes the slowdown), because scaling faster takes exponentially more money. So there’s more probability density of transformative advances before ~2030 than after, to the extent that scaling contributes to this probability.
That’s my reason to see 2030 as a meaningful threshold, Thane Ruthenis might be pointing to it for different reasons. It seems like it should certainly be salient for AGI companies, so a long timelines argument might want to address their narrative up to 2030 as a distinct case.