I’m trying to figure out a principled way to calculate/estimate how long it would take to cross the human range in a situation like this. How do you think about it? Taking the history of Go as a precedent, it would seem that we’d get AGI capable of competing with the average human first, and then several years (decades?) later we’d get an AGI architecture+project that blows through the entire human range in a few months. That feels like it can’t be right.
Depends on what you mean by “human range.” Go was decades only if you talk about crossing the range between people who don’t play Go at all to those who play as a hobby to those who have trained very extensively. If you restrict to the range of “how good would this human be if they trained extensively at Go?” then I’d guess the range is much smaller—I’d guess that the median person could reach a few amateur dan with practice, so maybe you are looking at like 10 stones of range between “unusually bad human” and “best human.”
My rough guess when I looked into it before was that doubling model size is worth about 1 stone around AlphaZero’s size/strength, so that’s about a factor of 1000 in model size.
then several years (decades?) later we’d get an AGI architecture+project that blows through the entire human range in a few months. That feels like it can’t be right.
I think this is mostly an artifact of scaling up R&D effort really quickly. If you have a 50th percentile human and then radically scale up R&D, it wouldn’t be that surprising if you got to “best human” within a year. The reason it would seem surprising to me for AGI is that investment will already be high enough that it won’t be possible to scale up R&D that much / that fast as you approach the average human.
I’m trying to figure out a principled way to calculate/estimate how long it would take to cross the human range in a situation like this. How do you think about it? Taking the history of Go as a precedent, it would seem that we’d get AGI capable of competing with the average human first, and then several years (decades?) later we’d get an AGI architecture+project that blows through the entire human range in a few months. That feels like it can’t be right.
Depends on what you mean by “human range.” Go was decades only if you talk about crossing the range between people who don’t play Go at all to those who play as a hobby to those who have trained very extensively. If you restrict to the range of “how good would this human be if they trained extensively at Go?” then I’d guess the range is much smaller—I’d guess that the median person could reach a few amateur dan with practice, so maybe you are looking at like 10 stones of range between “unusually bad human” and “best human.”
My rough guess when I looked into it before was that doubling model size is worth about 1 stone around AlphaZero’s size/strength, so that’s about a factor of 1000 in model size.
I think this is mostly an artifact of scaling up R&D effort really quickly. If you have a 50th percentile human and then radically scale up R&D, it wouldn’t be that surprising if you got to “best human” within a year. The reason it would seem surprising to me for AGI is that investment will already be high enough that it won’t be possible to scale up R&D that much / that fast as you approach the average human.