For some context on the ‘big computer’, Ilya previously had this discussion with the OpenAI lawyers.
Q: And why was OpenAI considering becoming a for profit at that time?
A: So the answer to this question has to do with the realization that me and others at OpenAI have made, roughly at the same time. And the realization is that to make progress in AI, you need a big computer. And you need a big computer because the brain is a big computer. You have 100 billion neurons, and 100 trillion synapses in the brain. And if your computer is small, I don’t know how good your AI is going to be. And the realization suddenly lets you say things like, ‘well wait a second, how are you going get this big computer?’. And that was the genesis of the for-profit conversation.
Q: And how did the need for compute, or computer power, relate to the for profit?
A: So the human brain is a computer of a certain size. It is a staggeringly large computer. And you can work backwards, from, well if the brain is this big, what size of a computer you might need. And you might do some calculation about how many dollars it would cost. And then you look at this number of dollars, and say ‘gosh, that’s a lot of dollars’. That is the genesis of the need for the for-profit.
So it certainly seems like he believed in something like the bioanchors view at the time. This might also be relevant to why he thinks SSI can make AGI/ASI on a limited compute budget.
To clarify the argument for the people react-ing: the linked post accuses the EA movement of wilful institutional stupidity regarding AI timelines. Eliezer has also expressed this belief (that EA timeline beliefs were an example of their motivated reasoning and relative untrustworthiness) in other places, and to a group of people I was with at Manifest. However, I think if even Ilya Sutskever also took biological anchors seriously, this is some evidence that the EAs were making good-faith inferences at the time from the limited capabilities they had, instead of that mistake in particular being indicative of systemic rot in EA institutions.
Note this is a separate belief from whether OpenPhilanthropy (in concert with the vast majority of the public, commodities traders, surveyed AI researchers, etc.) had timelines that were too long in 2020, whether it was actually dumb to make AI timelines based on biological anchors, or whether humanity depended on EAs to get this question right despite its apparent difficulty.
No? If there’s a false view that Bob and Carol both hold, and you claim it was knowably false at the time, it seems pretty reasonable to complain about Carol holding the view, regardless of what Bob thought?
It would be unfair to let Bob off the hook and only complain about Carol. But if you happen to know Carol better than Bob, then it’s pretty reasonable to mostly focus on talking to and about Bob?
For some context on the ‘big computer’, Ilya previously had this discussion with the OpenAI lawyers.
So it certainly seems like he believed in something like the bioanchors view at the time. This might also be relevant to why he thinks SSI can make AGI/ASI on a limited compute budget.
Separate discussion, but if this is mostly true, I think it’s kinda dumb to berate EAs for also believing in a bioanchors view.
IMO it’s overdetermined that berating EAs for believing in a bioanchors view is dumb.
To clarify the argument for the people react-ing: the linked post accuses the EA movement of wilful institutional stupidity regarding AI timelines. Eliezer has also expressed this belief (that EA timeline beliefs were an example of their motivated reasoning and relative untrustworthiness) in other places, and to a group of people I was with at Manifest. However, I think if even Ilya Sutskever also took biological anchors seriously, this is some evidence that the EAs were making good-faith inferences at the time from the limited capabilities they had, instead of that mistake in particular being indicative of systemic rot in EA institutions.
Note this is a separate belief from whether OpenPhilanthropy (in concert with the vast majority of the public, commodities traders, surveyed AI researchers, etc.) had timelines that were too long in 2020, whether it was actually dumb to make AI timelines based on biological anchors, or whether humanity depended on EAs to get this question right despite its apparent difficulty.
No? If there’s a false view that Bob and Carol both hold, and you claim it was knowably false at the time, it seems pretty reasonable to complain about Carol holding the view, regardless of what Bob thought?
It would be unfair to let Bob off the hook and only complain about Carol. But if you happen to know Carol better than Bob, then it’s pretty reasonable to mostly focus on talking to and about Bob?
This misunderstands my point, which I clarify in this comment: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/awcwmAjNwJazdbHrz/nightsky81-s-shortform?commentId=S9Wa5XCYvbHJLFmji. I’m not saying that Eliezer was unjustified in attempting to correct EA timeline beliefs, but that EAs’ views were probably good faith.