I’ll now present the fastest scenario for AI progress that I can articulate with a straight face. It addresses the potential challenges that figured into my slow scenario.
This seems incredibly slow for “the fastest scenario you can articulate”. Surely the fastest is more like:
EY is right, there is an incredibly simple algorithm that describes true ‘intelligence’. Like humans, this algorithm is 1000x more data and compute efficient than existing deep-learning networks. On midnight of day X, this algorithm is discovered by <a person/an LLM/an exhaustive search over all possible algorithms>. By 0200 of day X, the algorithm has reached the intelligence of a human being. It quickly snowballs by earning money on Mechanical Turk and using that money to rent out GPUs on AWS. By 0400 the algorithm has cracked nanotechnology and begins converting life into computronium. Several minutes later, life as we know it on Earth has ceased to exist.
You omitted “with a straight face”. I do not believe that the scenario you’ve described is plausible (in the timeframe where we don’t already have ASI by other means, i.e. as a path to ASI rather than a ramification of it).
This seems incredibly slow for “the fastest scenario you can articulate”. Surely the fastest is more like:
EY is right, there is an incredibly simple algorithm that describes true ‘intelligence’. Like humans, this algorithm is 1000x more data and compute efficient than existing deep-learning networks. On midnight of day X, this algorithm is discovered by <a person/an LLM/an exhaustive search over all possible algorithms>. By 0200 of day X, the algorithm has reached the intelligence of a human being. It quickly snowballs by earning money on Mechanical Turk and using that money to rent out GPUs on AWS. By 0400 the algorithm has cracked nanotechnology and begins converting life into computronium. Several minutes later, life as we know it on Earth has ceased to exist.
You omitted “with a straight face”. I do not believe that the scenario you’ve described is plausible (in the timeframe where we don’t already have ASI by other means, i.e. as a path to ASI rather than a ramification of it).