I’m quite confused about the toy model (1000 person-years of research, 900 of which “can be done in parallelizable 5-year chunks,” 100 of which “factor into four chunks that take 25 serial years apiece”).
What is a “person-year of research”? I’m parsing as a year of progress from someone working at an optimal level with all the necessary background knowledge. “All the necessary background knowledge” is overly simplistic, as I can imagine plenty of subproblems that take X years for one person to solve, but the 2nd year relies on knowledge in the 1st, etc. Also a year of research can accomplish much more depending on interaction effects with collaborators.
There’s an example of 180 people each working for 5 years to do the 900 parallelizable person years, or alternatively 1800 people working for 10 years if 10% do their job correctly half the time. What if we had 1800 people doing their job correctly all the time—would that still take 5 years in this model?
The remaining 100 person-years are also parallelizable into 25-year chunks, no? It seems that “more parallelizable vs less parallelizable” is a better framing than “parallelizable vs serial.”
It seems that the core idea here is that some problems require a minimum length of time to solve due to relevant subtasks needing to happen sequentially. This still applies to the “parallelizable 5-year chunks”—they each take a minimum of 5 years.
Also, can someone please define the terms “serial time” and “serial alignment research”?
I’m quite confused about the toy model (1000 person-years of research, 900 of which “can be done in parallelizable 5-year chunks,” 100 of which “factor into four chunks that take 25 serial years apiece”).
What is a “person-year of research”? I’m parsing as a year of progress from someone working at an optimal level with all the necessary background knowledge. “All the necessary background knowledge” is overly simplistic, as I can imagine plenty of subproblems that take X years for one person to solve, but the 2nd year relies on knowledge in the 1st, etc. Also a year of research can accomplish much more depending on interaction effects with collaborators.
There’s an example of 180 people each working for 5 years to do the 900 parallelizable person years, or alternatively 1800 people working for 10 years if 10% do their job correctly half the time. What if we had 1800 people doing their job correctly all the time—would that still take 5 years in this model?
The remaining 100 person-years are also parallelizable into 25-year chunks, no? It seems that “more parallelizable vs less parallelizable” is a better framing than “parallelizable vs serial.”
It seems that the core idea here is that some problems require a minimum length of time to solve due to relevant subtasks needing to happen sequentially. This still applies to the “parallelizable 5-year chunks”—they each take a minimum of 5 years.
Also, can someone please define the terms “serial time” and “serial alignment research”?