Pardon the half-sneering tone, but old nan can’t resist: « Oh, my sweet summer child, what do you know of fearing noob gains? Fear is for AI winter, my little lord, when the vanishing gradient problem was a hundred feet deep and the ice wind comes howling out of funding agencies, cutting every budget, dispersing the students, freezing the sparse spared researchers..
Seriously, three years is just a data point, and you want to conclude on the rate of change! I guess you would agree 2016-2022 saw more gains than 2010-2016, and not because the latter were boring times. I disagree that finding out what big transformers could do in the three last years was not a big deal, or even that this was low hanging fruits. I guess that it was low hanging fruits for you, because of the tools you were having access to, and I interpret your post as a deep and true intuition that the next step shall demand different tools (I vote for: « clever inferences from functional neuroscience & neuropsychology»). In any case, welcome on lesswrong and thanks for your precious input! (even if old nan was amazed you were expecting even faster progress!)
I’m as surprised by your summary as you were by the outcome.
You saw Tegmark and Bengio having strong arguments from years of alignment research on their side. I saw Bengio with a few good points that however ignore all of that (LLMs work much better than most did expect then timeline to adapt is shorter, oil compagnies knew about anthropic warming then we need regulations, we can’t prepare if we don’t first acknowledge the risk) and Tegmark repeating obvious strawmans (appeal to authority, reverse charge of the proof, etc) that made me regret they invited him. You saw LeCun and Mitchell having far weaker arguments. I saw them with the best points (AIs will likely help with other existential risks, foom/paperclip are incoherent bullshit, intelligence seems to negatively correlate with power trip), including an audacious concrete prediction by YL (that LLMs will soon become obsolete). We’ll see about that.
In the end and contrary to the public I did update toward Bengio (mostly because the other side only made points I already knew and agreed with). but your own post make me update toward LW being a failure of rational thinking, e.g. it’s an echo chamber that makes your ability to evaluate reality weaker, at least on this topic.