I have signed no contracts or agreements whose existence I cannot mention.
plex
Karma: 2,881
Suggest the following for independent reading: https://linktr.ee/modelsofmind, especially the first one and the multiagent models of mind sequence.
Maybe try from the Psychat-list from ACX: https://psychiatlist.astralcodexten.com/
(feel free to not go any deeper, appreciate you having engaged as much as you have!)
Yup, was just saying my first-pass guess would have been a less large labour->progress penalty. I do defer here fairly thoroughly.
The right way to think about 1.05x vs. 1.2x is not a 75% reduction, but instead what is the exponent for which 1.05^n=1.2
hmm, seems true if you’re expecting the people to not have applied a correction already, but less true if they are already making a correction and you’re estimating how wrong their correction is?
And yup, agree with that preregistration on all counts.
Clarification:
Change to the form to ask about without AI assistence?
Change to the website to refer to “AI provides the following speedups from a baseline of 2022⁄3 AI:”? (I don’t have write access)
(assuming 1 for now, will revert if incorrect)
Try @Kaj_Sotala or another therapist / coach from the community. It’s easier when you don’t have to doompill your psychological support person.
I think this risks people underappreciating how much progress is being sped up, my naive read of the UI was the numbers were based on “no AI” and I’d bet most readers would think the same at a glance. Changing the text from “AI provides the following speedups:” to “AI provides the following speedups from a baseline of 2022⁄3 AI:” would resolve this (I would guess common) misreading.
Alright, my first pass guess would have been algorithmic progress seems like the kind of thing that eats a much smaller penalty than most forms org-level progress, not none but not a 75% reduction, and not likely more than a 50% reduction, but you guys have the track record.
Cool, added a nudge to the last question.
Okay, switched. I’m curious about why you didn’t set the baseline to “no AI help”, especially if you expect pre-2024 AI to be mostly useless, as that seems like a cleaner comparison than asking people to remember how good old AIs were?
Post EAG London AI x-Safety Co-working Retreat
It’s a fair few anecdotes, plus some things like 25% of google’s code being written by AI in October, and comparing October models with today’s, how much of claude tokens is spent on code from their report, etc. I think I’ll tap out from this, don’t think trying to persuade you here is a sensible focus.
There was a LW gather.town during the pandemic, but I think it got decommissioned. That seems like the most natural home, I bet you could get a copy of it to revive if you wanted to lead it.
I can switch the number to 2023?
Wait, actually, I want to double click on this. What was the process that caused you to transform the number you got from the survey (1.2x) to the number on the website (1.05x)? Is there a question that could be asked which would not require a correction? Or which would have a pre-registered correction?[1]
- ^
Bonus: Was this one pre-registered?
- ^
This is not idle speculation, this is something I have checked. I’ve worked with a lot of devs and spoken to them about their AI use. I’ve spoken to two people who lead large (80+ person) dev teams, one of them recently let go 30 devs specifically because those people were not integrating AI into their workflows fast enough, so they were moving too slow compared to people who had. Another said AI meant engineering was essentially no longer a bottleneck.
Also: many other professions are using AI a lot. This mostly looks like people semi-automating their own job, which doesn’t show up that much in economics statistics.
Please be aware if your read on the situation is more than a couple of months old, it’s stale data. The world is moving fast now.
Oh, yup, missed that optional question in my ctrl-f. Thanks!
This survey looks like it’s asking something different? It’s asking about human range, no mention of speed-up from AI.
That resolves the inconsistency. I do worry that dropping a 20% speed-up to a 5% one, especially if post hoc, might cover up some important signal, but I’m sure you’ve put dramatically more cycles into thinking about this than me.
Thanks for the survey, would it make sense to just pass this form around so the numbers go to the same place and you’ll check, or should I make a copy and send results if I get them?
Your website lists
April 2025 as 1.13x
August 2025 as 1.21x
December 2025 as 1.30x
December 2024 as 1.05x (which seems contradicted by your survey, if the replies were in November)
If you think today’s number is ~1.33x we’re ~7 months ahead of schedule vs the listed forecast, unless I’m really misreading something.
Also, re: “would be excited for others to.”, is the survey public or easy to share if someone wanted to use the same questions?
And I’d bet 1:4 for the current number is actually >1.5x, if that’s more interesting. You’ve updated me to not have that as the main expectation, but still seems pretty plausible. Obviously depends on someone rerunning the survey, and reasonable that you’ve got your hands full with other things right now.
That seems like stale data, given how these graphs look. Even with the updates you caused, I’m happy to offer an even odds token bet ($100?) that a rerun of a similar survey would give significantly higher average (at least +0.2 over the predicted 1.13x, or about the AI you expect in Dec 2025). I’d be even more happy if the question asked about the researcher’s own productivity, as that seems like something they’d have better vision of, but would be pretty noisy with small sample so reasonable to stick with original question.
The best physio I’ve met did steps which were almost exactly the same as facilitating Focusing.