Unfortunately, it’s hard to predict it. I did describe how Grok 4[1] and GPT-5 are arguably evidence that the accelerated doubling trend between GPT4o and o3 is replaced by something slower. As far as I understand, were the slower trend to repeat METR’s original law (GPT2-GPT4?[2]), we would obtain the 2030s.
But, as you remark, “we should have some credence on new breakthroughs<...> that would lead to superhuman coders within a year or two, after being appropriately scaled up and tinkered with.” The actual probability of the breakthrough is likely a crux: you believe it to be 8% a year and I think of potential architectures waiting to be tried. One such architecture is diffusion models[3] which have actually been previewed and could be waiting to be released.
So assuming world peace, the timeline could end up being modeled by a combination of scaling compute up and few algorithmic breakthroughs with random acceleration effects, and each breakthrough would have to be somehow distributed by the amount of research done, then have the most powerful Agent trained to use the breakthrough, as happens with Agent-3 and Agent-4 created from Agent-2 in the forecast.
The worse-case scenario[4] also has timelines affected by compute deficiency. For instance, the Taiwan invasion is thought to happen by 2027 and could be likely to prompt the USG to force the companies to merge and to race (to AI takeover) as hard as they can.
GPT-4 and GPT-4o were released in March 2023 and May 2024 and had only one doubling in 14 months. Something hit a plateau, then in June 2024 Anthropic released Claude 3.5 Sonnet (old), and a new trend began. As of now, the trend likely ended at o3, and Grok 4 and GPT5 are apparently in the same paradigm which could have faced efficiency limits.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to predict it. I did describe how Grok 4[1] and GPT-5 are arguably evidence that the accelerated doubling trend between GPT4o and o3 is replaced by something slower. As far as I understand, were the slower trend to repeat METR’s original law (GPT2-GPT4?[2]), we would obtain the 2030s.
But, as you remark, “we should have some credence on new breakthroughs<...> that would lead to superhuman coders within a year or two, after being appropriately scaled up and tinkered with.” The actual probability of the breakthrough is likely a crux: you believe it to be 8% a year and I think of potential architectures waiting to be tried. One such architecture is diffusion models[3] which have actually been previewed and could be waiting to be released.
So assuming world peace, the timeline could end up being modeled by a combination of scaling compute up and few algorithmic breakthroughs with random acceleration effects, and each breakthrough would have to be somehow distributed by the amount of research done, then have the most powerful Agent trained to use the breakthrough, as happens with Agent-3 and Agent-4 created from Agent-2 in the forecast.
Maybe a blog post explaining more about your timelines and how they’ve updated would help?
The worse-case scenario[4] also has timelines affected by compute deficiency. For instance, the Taiwan invasion is thought to happen by 2027 and could be likely to prompt the USG to force the companies to merge and to race (to AI takeover) as hard as they can.
Grok 4 is also known to have been trained by spending similar amounts of compute on pretraining and RL. Is it also known about GPT-5?
GPT-4 and GPT-4o were released in March 2023 and May 2024 and had only one doubling in 14 months. Something hit a plateau, then in June 2024 Anthropic released Claude 3.5 Sonnet (old), and a new trend began. As of now, the trend likely ended at o3, and Grok 4 and GPT5 are apparently in the same paradigm which could have faced efficiency limits.
They do rapidly generate text (e.g. code). But I don’t understand how they, say, decide to look important facts up.
Of course, the absolute worst scenario is a black swan like currency collapse or China’s responce with missile strikes.
Yeah we are working on it sorry!