Addendum: this is getting really inside baseball-y and sort of cringe to say out loud, but one of my favorite niche things is when writers who’ve influenced my thinking growing up say nice things about each other, like when Scott A said these nice things about the other Scott A one time, and the other Scott A said these nice things as well. So, Eliezer on Gwern:
Dwarkesh Patel1:48:36
What is the thing where we can sort of establish your track record before everybody falls over dead?
Eliezer Yudkowsky1:48:41
It’s hard. It is just easier to predict the endpoint than it is to predict the path. Some people will claim that I’ve done poorly compared to others who tried to predict things. I would dispute this. I think that the Hanson-Yudkowsky foom debate was won by Gwern Branwen, but I do think that Gwern Branwen is well to the Yudkowsky side of Yudkowsky in the original foom debate.
Roughly, Hansen was like — you’re going to have all these distinct handcrafted systems that incorporate lots of human knowledge specialized for particular domains. Handcrafted to incorporate human knowledge, not just run on giant data sets. I was like — you’re going to have a carefully crafted architecture with a bunch of subsystems and that thing is going to look at the data and not be handcrafted to the particular features of the data. It’s going to learn the data. Then the actual thing is like — Ha ha. You don’t have this handcrafted system that learns, you just stack more layers. So like, Hanson here, Yudkowsky here, reality there. This would be my interpretation of what happened in the past.
And if you want to be like — Well, who did better than that? It’s people like Shane Legg and Gwern Branwen. If you look at the whole planet, you can find somebody who made better predictions than Eliezer Yudkowsky, that’s for sure. Are these people currently telling you that you’re safe? No, they are not.
and then
Dwarkesh Patel3:39:58
Yeah, I think that’s a good place to close the discussion on AIs.
Eliezer Yudkowsky3:40:03
I do kind of want to mention one last thing. In historical terms, if you look out the actual battle that was being fought on the block, it was me going like — “I expect there to be AI systems that do a whole bunch of different stuff.” And Robin Hanson being like — “I expect there to be a whole bunch of different AI systems that do a whole different bunch of stuff.”
Dwarkesh Patel3:40:27
But that was one particular debate with one particular person.
Eliezer Yudkowsky3:40:30
Yeah, but your planet, having made the strange reason, given its own widespread theories, to not invest massive resources in having a much larger version of this conversation, as it apparently deemed prudent, given the implicit model that it had of the world, such that I was investing a bunch of resources in this and kind of dragging Robin Hanson along with me. Though he did have his own separate line of investigation into topics like these.
Being there as I was, my model having led me to this important place where the rest of the world apparently thought it was fine to let it go hang, such debate was actually what we had at the time. Are we really going to see these single AI systems that do all this different stuff? Is this whole general intelligence notion meaningful at all? And I staked out the bold position for it. It actually was bold.
And people did not all say —”Oh, Robin Hansen, you fool, why do you have this exotic position?” They were going like — “Behold these two luminaries debating, or behold these two idiots debating” and not massively coming down on one side of it or other. So in historical terms, I dislike making it out like I was right about anything when I feel I’ve been wrong about so much and yet I was right about anything.
And relative to what the rest of the planet deemed it important stuff to spend its time on, given their implicit model of how it’s going to play out, what you can do with minds, where AI goes. I think I did okay. Gwern Branwen did better. Shane Legg arguably did better.
Addendum: this is getting really inside baseball-y and sort of cringe to say out loud, but one of my favorite niche things is when writers who’ve influenced my thinking growing up say nice things about each other, like when Scott A said these nice things about the other Scott A one time, and the other Scott A said these nice things as well. So, Eliezer on Gwern:
and then