It really depends what you mean by a small amount of time. On a cosmic scale, ten years is indeed short. But I definitely interpreted Eliezer back then (for example, while I worked at MIRI) as making a way stronger claim than this; that we’d e.g. within a few days/weeks/months go from AI that was almost totally incapable of intellectual work to AI that can overpower humanity. And I think you need to believe that much stronger claim in order for a lot of the predictions about the future that MIRI-sphere people were making back then to make sense. I wish we had all been clearer at the time about what specifically everyone was predicting.
I’d be excited for people (with aid of LLMs) to go back and grade how various past predictions from MIRI folks are doing, plus ideally others who disagreed. I just read back through part of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vwLxd6hhFvPbvKmBH/yudkowsky-and-christiano-discuss-takeoff-speeds and my quick take is that Paul looks mildly better than Eliezer due to predicting larger impacts/revenue/investment pre-AGI (which we appear to be on track for and to some extent already seeing) and predicitng a more smooth increase in coding abilities, but hard to say in part because Eliezer mostly didn’t want to make confident predictions, also I think Paul was wrong about Nvidia but that felt like an aside.
edit: oh also there’s the IMO bet, I didn’t get to that part on my partial re-read, that one goes to Eliezer.
Looking through IEM and the Yudkowsky-Hanson debate also seems like potentially useful sources, as well as things that I’m probably forgetting or unaware of.
It really depends what you mean by a small amount of time. On a cosmic scale, ten years is indeed short. But I definitely interpreted Eliezer back then (for example, while I worked at MIRI) as making a way stronger claim than this; that we’d e.g. within a few days/weeks/months go from AI that was almost totally incapable of intellectual work to AI that can overpower humanity. And I think you need to believe that much stronger claim in order for a lot of the predictions about the future that MIRI-sphere people were making back then to make sense. I wish we had all been clearer at the time about what specifically everyone was predicting.
I’d be excited for people (with aid of LLMs) to go back and grade how various past predictions from MIRI folks are doing, plus ideally others who disagreed. I just read back through part of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vwLxd6hhFvPbvKmBH/yudkowsky-and-christiano-discuss-takeoff-speeds and my quick take is that Paul looks mildly better than Eliezer due to predicting larger impacts/revenue/investment pre-AGI (which we appear to be on track for and to some extent already seeing) and predicitng a more smooth increase in coding abilities, but hard to say in part because Eliezer mostly didn’t want to make confident predictions, also I think Paul was wrong about Nvidia but that felt like an aside.
edit: oh also there’s the IMO bet, I didn’t get to that part on my partial re-read, that one goes to Eliezer.
Looking through IEM and the Yudkowsky-Hanson debate also seems like potentially useful sources, as well as things that I’m probably forgetting or unaware of.