I would say the comment had two purposes: (i) if my implications were wrong/misleading, I would be corrected (thank you!), (ii) to encourage future posts on this/related topics to think hard about the sensitivity of the world-model to different types of future information.
I wouldn’t say I want a more quantitative measure—although it’s important, trying to pin them down too much can make the very precise written content into “the thing that’s easier to write in a precise way” and not “what we actually believe”.
Ah, I misread your original question, I thought you were talking about this most recent update in particular whereas it seems you are more interested in future updates. Yeah the set of things that could update us in the future is bigger than the set of things that did update us this time… let me think… An obvious one is, people will hopefully be trying to extend the METR graph or more generally collect evidence about AI ability to do real-world coding tasks that would take humans weeks, months, years. If they find that the METR trend is very obviously going superexponential, that would be an update towards much shorter timelines.
There are other ways of trying to guess at the AC arrival date besides METR trend; we’ll be looking at those and seeing how solid they start looking. Most notably, uplift studies. If we had a solid trend to extrapolate of the form “Here’s how much uplift people are getting when they use AI for coding” that would be significantly better than the METR trend.
Revenue also works maybe, e.g. if AI for coding seems like it’ll soon surpass the combined income of all software engineers.
I would say the comment had two purposes:
(i) if my implications were wrong/misleading, I would be corrected (thank you!),
(ii) to encourage future posts on this/related topics to think hard about the sensitivity of the world-model to different types of future information.
I wouldn’t say I want a more quantitative measure—although it’s important, trying to pin them down too much can make the very precise written content into “the thing that’s easier to write in a precise way” and not “what we actually believe”.
Ah, I misread your original question, I thought you were talking about this most recent update in particular whereas it seems you are more interested in future updates. Yeah the set of things that could update us in the future is bigger than the set of things that did update us this time… let me think… An obvious one is, people will hopefully be trying to extend the METR graph or more generally collect evidence about AI ability to do real-world coding tasks that would take humans weeks, months, years. If they find that the METR trend is very obviously going superexponential, that would be an update towards much shorter timelines.
There are other ways of trying to guess at the AC arrival date besides METR trend; we’ll be looking at those and seeing how solid they start looking. Most notably, uplift studies. If we had a solid trend to extrapolate of the form “Here’s how much uplift people are getting when they use AI for coding” that would be significantly better than the METR trend.
Revenue also works maybe, e.g. if AI for coding seems like it’ll soon surpass the combined income of all software engineers.