Note that Metaculus predictions don’t seem to have been meaningfully changed in the past few weeks, despite these announcements. Are there other forecasts which could be referenced?
This post is mainly targeted at people capable of forming a strong enough inside view to get them above >30% without requiring a moving average of experts which may take months to update (since it’s a popular question).
For everyone else, I don’t think you should update much on this except vis a vis the number of other people who agree.
Actually, the Metaculus community prediction has a recency bias: > approximately sqrt(n) new predictions need to happen in order to substantially change the Community Prediction on a question that already has n players predicting.
In this case, n=298, the prediction should change substantially after sqrt(n)=18 new predictions (usually it takes up to a few days). Over the past week, there were almost this many predictions and the AGI community median has shifted 2043 → 2039, and the 30th percentile is 8 years.
My impression (based on using Metaculus a lot) is that, while questions like this may give you a reasonable ballpark estimate and it’s great that they exist, they’re nowhere close to being efficient enough for it to mean much when they fail to move. As a proxy for the amount of mental effort that goes into it, there’s only been three comments on the linked question in the last month. I’ve been complaining about people calling Metaculus a “prediction market” because if people think it’s a prediction market then they’ll assume there’s a point to be made like “if you can tell that the prediction is inefficient, then why aren’t you rich, at least in play money?” But the estimate you’re seeing is just a recency-weighted median of the predictions of everyone who presses the button, not weighted by past predictive record, and not weighted by willingness-to-bet, because there’s no buying or selling and everyone makes only one prediction. It’s basically a poll of people who are trying to get good results (in terms of Brier/log score and Metaculus points) on their answers.
I suspect that these developments look a bit less surprising if you’ve been trying to forecast progress here, and so might be at least partially priced in. Anyhow, the forecast you linked to shows >10% likelihood before spring 2025, three years from now. That’s extraordinarily aggressive compared to (implied) conventional wisdom, and probably a little more aggressive than I’d be as an EA AI prof with an interest in language models and scaling laws.
Note that Metaculus predictions don’t seem to have been meaningfully changed in the past few weeks, despite these announcements. Are there other forecasts which could be referenced?
This post is mainly targeted at people capable of forming a strong enough inside view to get them above >30% without requiring a moving average of experts which may take months to update (since it’s a popular question).
For everyone else, I don’t think you should update much on this except vis a vis the number of other people who agree.
Actually, the Metaculus community prediction has a recency bias:
> approximately sqrt(n) new predictions need to happen in order to substantially change the Community Prediction on a question that already has n players predicting.
In this case, n=298, the prediction should change substantially after sqrt(n)=18 new predictions (usually it takes up to a few days). Over the past week, there were almost this many predictions and the AGI community median has shifted 2043 → 2039, and the 30th percentile is 8 years.
My impression (based on using Metaculus a lot) is that, while questions like this may give you a reasonable ballpark estimate and it’s great that they exist, they’re nowhere close to being efficient enough for it to mean much when they fail to move. As a proxy for the amount of mental effort that goes into it, there’s only been three comments on the linked question in the last month. I’ve been complaining about people calling Metaculus a “prediction market” because if people think it’s a prediction market then they’ll assume there’s a point to be made like “if you can tell that the prediction is inefficient, then why aren’t you rich, at least in play money?” But the estimate you’re seeing is just a recency-weighted median of the predictions of everyone who presses the button, not weighted by past predictive record, and not weighted by willingness-to-bet, because there’s no buying or selling and everyone makes only one prediction. It’s basically a poll of people who are trying to get good results (in terms of Brier/log score and Metaculus points) on their answers.
I suspect that these developments look a bit less surprising if you’ve been trying to forecast progress here, and so might be at least partially priced in. Anyhow, the forecast you linked to shows >10% likelihood before spring 2025, three years from now. That’s extraordinarily aggressive compared to (implied) conventional wisdom, and probably a little more aggressive than I’d be as an EA AI prof with an interest in language models and scaling laws.
Thanks, yeah now that I look closer Metaculus shows a 25% cumulative probability before April 2029, which is not too far off from OP’s 30% claim.
Note the answer changes a lot based on how the question is operationalized. This stronger operationalization has dates around a decade later.