More concretely, my median is that AI research will be automated by the end of 2028, and AI will be better than humans at >95% of current intellectual labor by the end of 2029.
It seems like you think AI research will be (fully?) automated once AIs are at 80% reliability on 1 month long benchmarkable / easy-to-check SWE tasks. (Or within 1 year of 50% reliability on 1 month tasks.) Isn’t this surprisingly fast? I’d guess there is a decently large gap between 1 month tasks and “fully automated AI R&D”. Partial automation will speed things up, but will it speed things up this much?
I think a 1-year 50%-time-horizon is very likely not enough to automate AI research. The reason I think AI research will be automated by EOY 2028 is because of speedups from partial automation as well as leaving open the possibility of additional breakthroughs naturally occurring.
A few considerations that make me think the doubling time will get faster:
AI speeding up AI research probably starts making a dent in the doubling time (making it at least 10% faster) by the time we hit 100hr time horizons (although it’s pretty hard to reason about the impacts here)
I think I place some probability on the “inherently superexponential time horizons” hypothesis. The reason I think it is because to me, 1-month-coherence, 1-year-coherence, and 10-year-coherence (of the kind performed by humans) seem like extremely similar skills and will thus be learned in quick succession.
It’s plausible reasoning models decreased the doubling time from 7 months to 4 months. It’s plausible we get another reasoning-shaped breakthrough.
So my best guess for the 50% and 80% time horizons at EOY 2028 are more like 10yrs and 3yrs or something. But past ~2027 I care more about how much AI R&D is being automated rather than the time horizon itself (partially because I have FUD about what N-year tasks should even look like by definition).
It seems like you think AI research will be (fully?) automated once AIs are at 80% reliability on 1 month long benchmarkable / easy-to-check SWE tasks. (Or within 1 year of 50% reliability on 1 month tasks.) Isn’t this surprisingly fast? I’d guess there is a decently large gap between 1 month tasks and “fully automated AI R&D”. Partial automation will speed things up, but will it speed things up this much?
I think a 1-year 50%-time-horizon is very likely not enough to automate AI research. The reason I think AI research will be automated by EOY 2028 is because of speedups from partial automation as well as leaving open the possibility of additional breakthroughs naturally occurring.
A few considerations that make me think the doubling time will get faster:
AI speeding up AI research probably starts making a dent in the doubling time (making it at least 10% faster) by the time we hit 100hr time horizons (although it’s pretty hard to reason about the impacts here)
I think I place some probability on the “inherently superexponential time horizons” hypothesis. The reason I think it is because to me, 1-month-coherence, 1-year-coherence, and 10-year-coherence (of the kind performed by humans) seem like extremely similar skills and will thus be learned in quick succession.
It’s plausible reasoning models decreased the doubling time from 7 months to 4 months. It’s plausible we get another reasoning-shaped breakthrough.
So my best guess for the 50% and 80% time horizons at EOY 2028 are more like 10yrs and 3yrs or something. But past ~2027 I care more about how much AI R&D is being automated rather than the time horizon itself (partially because I have FUD about what N-year tasks should even look like by definition).