Honestly, that thread did initially sound kind of copium-y to me too, which I was surprised by, since his AI takes are usually pretty good[1] and level-headed. But it makes much more sense under the interpretation that this isn’t him being in denial about AI performance, but him undermining OpenAI in response to them defecting against IMO. That’s why he’s pushing the “this isn’t a fair human-AI comparison” line.
I would not characterize Tao’s usual takes on AI as particularly good (unless you compare with a relatively low baseline).
He’s been overall pretty conservative and mostly stuck to reasonable claims about current AI. So there’s not much to criticize in particular, but it has come at the cost of him not appreciating the possible/likely trajectories of where things are going, which I think misses the forest for the trees.
Honestly, that thread did initially sound kind of copium-y to me too, which I was surprised by, since his AI takes are usually pretty good[1] and level-headed. But it makes much more sense under the interpretation that this isn’t him being in denial about AI performance, but him undermining OpenAI in response to them defecting against IMO. That’s why he’s pushing the “this isn’t a fair human-AI comparison” line.
Edit: For someone who doesn’t “feel the ASI”, I mean.
I would not characterize Tao’s usual takes on AI as particularly good (unless you compare with a relatively low baseline).
He’s been overall pretty conservative and mostly stuck to reasonable claims about current AI. So there’s not much to criticize in particular, but it has come at the cost of him not appreciating the possible/likely trajectories of where things are going, which I think misses the forest for the trees.
Oh, yeah, he’s not superintelligence-pilled or anything. I was implicitly comparing with a relatively low baseline, yes.