This seems like an impressive level of successfully betting on future trends before they became obvious.
apparently this doom path polls much better than treacherous turn stories
Are you talking about literal polling here? Are there actual numbers on what doom stories the public finds more and less plausible, and with what exact audience?
I held onto the finished paper for months and waited for GPT-4′s release before releasing it to have good timing
[...]
I recognize this paper was around a year ahead of its time and maybe I should have held onto it to release it later.
It’s interesting that paper timing is so important. I’d have guessed earlier is better (more time for others to build on it, the ideas to seep into the field, and presumably gives more “academic street cred”), and any publicity boost from a recent paper (e.g. journalists more likely to be interested or whatever) could mostly be recovered later by just pushing it again when it becomes relevant (e.g. “interview with scientists who predicted X / thought about Y already a year ago” seems pretty journalist-y).
Currently, the only way to become an AI x-risk expert is to live in Berkeley.
There’s an underlying gist here that I agree with, but the this point seems too strong; I don’t think there is literally no one who counts as an expert who hasn’t lived in the Bay, let alone Berkeley alone. I would maybe buy it if the claim were about visiting.
This seems like an impressive level of successfully betting on future trends before they became obvious.
Are you talking about literal polling here? Are there actual numbers on what doom stories the public finds more and less plausible, and with what exact audience?
It’s interesting that paper timing is so important. I’d have guessed earlier is better (more time for others to build on it, the ideas to seep into the field, and presumably gives more “academic street cred”), and any publicity boost from a recent paper (e.g. journalists more likely to be interested or whatever) could mostly be recovered later by just pushing it again when it becomes relevant (e.g. “interview with scientists who predicted X / thought about Y already a year ago” seems pretty journalist-y).
There’s an underlying gist here that I agree with, but the this point seems too strong; I don’t think there is literally no one who counts as an expert who hasn’t lived in the Bay, let alone Berkeley alone. I would maybe buy it if the claim were about visiting.