[Linkpost] “The tables have turned on AI sceptics” by Stefan_Schubert

About this episode

The episode discusses the evolving perspectives on AI timelines and the empirical evidence surrounding transformative AI.

This is a link post. Could we have human-level AI within the next few decades? For a long time, many people have dismissed this idea as armchair speculation. In their view, we shouldn’t ground our beliefs about transformative technologies in vague hunches and fragile multi-step arguments. We need more solid evidence, like clear empirical trends. We need to be epistemically conservative. I have some conservative instincts myself, but I’m not sure they favour long AI timelines anymore. That might have been the case ten or even five years ago, but things have changed. Bio Anchors It's no accident that the AI timelines debate long lacked empirical grounding. While climate change has a natural metric – temperature – AI progress doesn’t. As a result, forecasts have often relied on intuition. But in recent years, some researchers have tried to put timeline forecasting on a firmer empirical footing. One attempt that received plenty of attention was Ajeya Cotra's Bio Anchors report (2020), which plotted compute projections against estimates of the human brain's compute usage. The model produced multiple forecasts of when it would become feasible to train transformative AI, with a median…

People in this episode

Host: EA Forum Team

Guest: Stefan_Schubert

Topics covered

• AI timelines
• empirical evidence
• transformative technologies
• forecasting
• Bio Anchors

Keywords

• AI sceptics
• human-level AI
• empirical trends
• compute projections
• capability benchmarks

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: EA Forum Team

Books & works: Bio Anchors

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