Not sure exactly what the claim is, but happy to give my own view.
I think “AGI” is pretty meaningless as a threshold, and at any rate it’s way too imprecise to be useful for this kind of quantitative forecast (I would intuitively describe GPT-3 as a general AI, and beyond that I’m honestly unclear on what distinction people are pointing at when they say “AGI”).
My intuition is that by the time that you have an AI which is superhuman at every task (e.g. for $10/h of hardware it strictly dominates hiring a remote human for any task) then you are likely weeks rather than months from the singularity.
But mostly this is because I think “strictly dominates” is a very hard standard which we will only meet long after AI systems are driving the large majority of technical progress in computer software, computer hardware, robotics, etc. (Also note that we can fail to meet that standard by computing costs rising based on demand for AI.)
My views on this topic are particularly poorly-developed because I think that the relevant action (both technological transformation and catastrophic risk) mostly happens before this point, so I usually don’t think this far ahead.
Thanks! That’s what I thought you’d say. By “AGI” I did mean something like “for $10/h of hardware it strictly dominates hiring a remote human for any task” though I’d maybe restrict it to strategically relevant tasks like AI R&D, and also people might not actually hire AIs to do stuff because they might be afraid / understand that they haven’t solved alignment yet, but it still counts since the AIs could do the job. Also there may be some funny business around the price of the hardware—I feel like it should still count as AGI if a company is running millions of AIs that each individually are better than a typical tech company remote worker in every way, even if there is an ongoing bidding war and technically the price of GPUs is now so high that it’s costing $1,000/hr on the open market for each AGI. We still get FOOM if the AGIs are doing the research, regardless of what the on-paper price is. (I definitely feel like I might be missing something here, I don’t think in economic terms like this nearly as often as you do so)
But mostly this is because I think “strictly dominates” is a very hard standard which we will only meet long after AI systems are driving the large majority of technical progress in computer software, computer hardware, robotics, etc.
My timelines are too short to agree with this part alas. Well, what do you mean by “long after?” Six months? Three years? Twelve years?
Not sure exactly what the claim is, but happy to give my own view.
I think “AGI” is pretty meaningless as a threshold, and at any rate it’s way too imprecise to be useful for this kind of quantitative forecast (I would intuitively describe GPT-3 as a general AI, and beyond that I’m honestly unclear on what distinction people are pointing at when they say “AGI”).
My intuition is that by the time that you have an AI which is superhuman at every task (e.g. for $10/h of hardware it strictly dominates hiring a remote human for any task) then you are likely weeks rather than months from the singularity.
But mostly this is because I think “strictly dominates” is a very hard standard which we will only meet long after AI systems are driving the large majority of technical progress in computer software, computer hardware, robotics, etc. (Also note that we can fail to meet that standard by computing costs rising based on demand for AI.)
My views on this topic are particularly poorly-developed because I think that the relevant action (both technological transformation and catastrophic risk) mostly happens before this point, so I usually don’t think this far ahead.
Thanks! That’s what I thought you’d say. By “AGI” I did mean something like “for $10/h of hardware it strictly dominates hiring a remote human for any task” though I’d maybe restrict it to strategically relevant tasks like AI R&D, and also people might not actually hire AIs to do stuff because they might be afraid / understand that they haven’t solved alignment yet, but it still counts since the AIs could do the job. Also there may be some funny business around the price of the hardware—I feel like it should still count as AGI if a company is running millions of AIs that each individually are better than a typical tech company remote worker in every way, even if there is an ongoing bidding war and technically the price of GPUs is now so high that it’s costing $1,000/hr on the open market for each AGI. We still get FOOM if the AGIs are doing the research, regardless of what the on-paper price is. (I definitely feel like I might be missing something here, I don’t think in economic terms like this nearly as often as you do so)
My timelines are too short to agree with this part alas. Well, what do you mean by “long after?” Six months? Three years? Twelve years?
Thanks for offering your view Paul, and I apologize if I misrepresented your view.