A long time ago I spent a few months reading and thinking about Ajeya’s bio anchors report. I played around with the spreadsheet version of it, trying out all sorts of different settings, and in particular changing the various settings to values that I thought were more plausible.
As a result I figured out what the biggest cruxes were between me and Ajeya—the differences in variable-settings that led to the largest differences in our timelines.
The biggest one was (unsurprisingly, in retrospect) the difference in where we put our probability mass for the training requirements distribution. That in turn broke down into several sub-cruxes.
I wrote Fun with +12 OOMs to draw everyone’s attention to that big uber-crux. In addition to just pointing out that uber-crux, my post also operationalized it and explained it so that people didn’t have to be super familiar with Ajeya’s report to understand what the debate was about. Also, I gave five examples of things you could do with +12 OOMs, very concrete examples, which people could then argue about, in the service of answering the uber-crux.
So, what I would like to see now is the same thing I wanted to see after writing the post, i.e. what I hoped to inspire with the post: A vigorous debate over questions like “What are the reasons to think OmegaStar would constitute AGI/TAI/etc.? What are the reasons to think it wouldn’t?” and “What about Crystal Nights?” and “What about a smaller version of OmegaStar, that was only +6 OOMs instead of +12? Is that significantly less likely to work, or is the list of reasons why it might or might not work basically the same?” All in the service of answering the Big Crux, i.e. probability that +12 OOMs would be enough / more generally, what the probability distribution over OOMs should be.
To elaborate on what Jacob said:
A long time ago I spent a few months reading and thinking about Ajeya’s bio anchors report. I played around with the spreadsheet version of it, trying out all sorts of different settings, and in particular changing the various settings to values that I thought were more plausible.
As a result I figured out what the biggest cruxes were between me and Ajeya—the differences in variable-settings that led to the largest differences in our timelines.
The biggest one was (unsurprisingly, in retrospect) the difference in where we put our probability mass for the training requirements distribution. That in turn broke down into several sub-cruxes.
I wrote Fun with +12 OOMs to draw everyone’s attention to that big uber-crux. In addition to just pointing out that uber-crux, my post also operationalized it and explained it so that people didn’t have to be super familiar with Ajeya’s report to understand what the debate was about. Also, I gave five examples of things you could do with +12 OOMs, very concrete examples, which people could then argue about, in the service of answering the uber-crux.
So, what I would like to see now is the same thing I wanted to see after writing the post, i.e. what I hoped to inspire with the post: A vigorous debate over questions like “What are the reasons to think OmegaStar would constitute AGI/TAI/etc.? What are the reasons to think it wouldn’t?” and “What about Crystal Nights?” and “What about a smaller version of OmegaStar, that was only +6 OOMs instead of +12? Is that significantly less likely to work, or is the list of reasons why it might or might not work basically the same?” All in the service of answering the Big Crux, i.e. probability that +12 OOMs would be enough / more generally, what the probability distribution over OOMs should be.