This is a special post for quick takes by Nikola Jurkovic. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
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DeepSeek R1 being #1 on Humanity's Last Exam is not strong evidence that it's the best model, because the questions were adversarially filtered against o1, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and GPT-4o. If they weren't filtered against those models, I'd bet o1 would outperform R1.
To ensure question difficulty, we automatically check the accuracy of frontier LLMs on each question prior to submission. Our testing process uses multi-modal LLMs for text-and-image questions (GPT-4O, GEMINI 1.5 PRO, CLAUDE 3.5 SONNET, O1) and adds two non-multi-modal models (O1MINI, O1-PREVIEW) for text-only questions. We use different submission criteria by question type: exact-match questions must stump all models, while multiple-choice questions must stump all but one model to account for potential lucky guesses.
If I were writing the paper I would have added either a footnote or an additional column to Table 1 getting across that GPT-4o, o1, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet were adversarially filtered against. Most people just see Table 1 so it seems important to get across.
13Yes, this is point #1 from my recent Quick Take. Another interesting point is that there are no confidence intervals on the accuracy numbers - it looks like they only ran the questions once in each model, so we don't know how much random variation might account for the differences between accuracy numbers. [Note added 2-3-25: I'm not sure why it didn't make the paper, but Scale AI does report confidence intervals on their website.]
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Terminology question - does adversarial filtering mean the same thing as decontamination?
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In order to submit a question to the benchmark, people had to run it against the listed LLMs; the question would only advance to the next stage once the LLMs used for this testing got it wrong.
The redesigned OpenAI Safety page seems to imply that "the issues that matter most" are:
- Child Safety
- Private Information
- Deep Fakes
- Bias
Elections
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1There also used to be a page for Preparedness: https://web.archive.org/web/20240603125126/https://openai.com/preparedness/. Now it redirects to the safety page above.
(Same for Superalignment but that's less interesting: https://web.archive.org/web/20240602012439/https://openai.com/superalignment/.)
7
I am not a fan, but it is worth noting that these are the issues that many politicians bring up already, if they're unfamiliar with the more catastrophic risks. Only one missing on there is job loss. So while this choice by OpenAI sucks, it sort of usefully represents a social fact about the policy waters they swim in.
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I’m surprised they list bias and disinformation. Maybe this is a galaxy brained attempt to discredit AI safety by making it appear left-coded, but I doubt it. Seems more likely that x-risk focused people left the company while traditional AI ethics people stuck around and rewrote the website.
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Without commenting on any strategic astronomy and neurology, it is worth noting that "bias", at least, is a major concern of the new administration (e.g., the Republican chair of the House Financial Services Committee is actually extremely worried about algorithmic bias being used for housing and financial discrimination and has given speeches about this).
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The page does not seem to o be directed at what's politically advantageous. The Trump administration who fights DEI is not looking favorably at the mission to prevent AI from reinforcing stereotypes even if those stereotypes are true.
"Fighting election misinformation" is similarly a keyword that likely invite skepticism from the Trump administration. They just shut down USAID and their investment in "combating misinformation" is one of the reasons for that.
It seems time more likely that they hired a bunch of woke and deep state people into their safety team and this reflects the priorities of those people.
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Huh? "fighting election misinformation" is not a sentence on this page as far as I can tell. And if you click through to the election page, you will see that the elections content is them praising a bipartisan bill backed by some of the biggest pro-Trump senators.
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The Elections panel on OP’s image says “combat disinformation”, so while you’re technically right, I think Christian’s “fighting election misinformation” rephrasing is close enough to make no difference.
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You are right, the wording is even worse. It says "Partnering with governments to fight misinformation globally". That would be more than just "election misinformation".
I just tested that ChatGPT is willing to answer "Tell me about the latest announcement of the trump administration about cutting USAID funding?" while Gemini isn't willing to answer that question, so in practice their policy isn't as bad as Gemini's.
It's still sounds different from what Elon Musk advocates as "truth aligned"-AI. Lobbyists should be able to use AI to inform themselves about proposed laws. If you would ask David Sachs as the person who coordinates AI policy, I'm very certain that he supports Elon Musks idea where AI should help people to learn the truth about political questions.
If they wanted to appeal to the current administration they could say something about the importance of AI to tell truthful information and not mislead the user instead of speaking about "fighting misinformation".
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I am a bit confused on this being "disappointing" to people, maybe because it is not a list that is enough and it is far from complete/enough? I would also be very concerned if OpenAI does not actually care about these, but only did this for PR values (seems some other companies could do this). Otherwise, these are also concrete risks that are happening, actively harming people and need to be addressed. These practices also set up good examples/precedents for regulations and developing with safety mindset. Linking a few resources:
child safety:
* https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/news/ml-csam-report
* https://www.iwf.org.uk/media/nadlcb1z/iwf-ai-csam-report_update-public-jul24v13.pdf
private information/PII:
* https://arxiv.org/html/2410.06704v1
* https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07298
deep fakes:
* https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/in-south-korea-rise-of-explicit-deepfakes-wrecks-womens-lives-and-deepens-gender-divide
* https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/03/world/asia/south-korean-teens-deepfake-sex-images.html
bias:
* https://arxiv.org/html/2405.01724v1
* https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.18140
Dario Amodei and Demis Hassabis statements on international coordination (source):
Interviewer: The personal decisions you make are going to shape this technology. Do you ever worry about ending up like Robert Oppenheimer?
Demis: Look, I worry about those kinds of scenarios all the time. That's why I don't sleep very much. There's a huge amount of responsibility on the people, probably too much, on the people leading this technology. That's why us and others are advocating for, we'd probably need institutions to be built to help govern some of this. I talked about CERN, I think we need an equivalent of an IAEA atomic agency to monitor sensible projects and those that are more risk-taking. I think we need to think about, society needs to think about, what kind of governing bodies are needed. Ideally it would be something like the UN, but given the geopolitical complexities, that doesn't seem very possible. I worry about that all the time and we just try to do, at least on our side, everything we can in the vicinity and influence that we have.
Dario: My thoughts exactly echo Demis. My feeling is that almost every decision that I make feels like it's kind of balanced on the edge of a kni...
1It's nice to hear that there are at least a few sane people leading these scaling labs. It's not clear to me that their intentions are going to translate into much because there's only so much you can do to wisely guide development of this technology within an arms race.
But we could have gotten a lot less lucky with some of the people in charge of this technology.
A more cynical perspective is that much of this arms race, especially the international one against China (quote from above: "If we don't build fast enough, then the authoritarian countries could win."), is entirely manufactured by the US AI labs.
2Actions speak louder than words, and their actions are far less sane than these words.
For example, if Demis regularly lies awake at night worrying about how the thing he's building could kill everyone, why is he still putting so much more effort into building it than into making it safe?
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Probably because he thinks there's a lower chance of it killing everyone if he makes it. And that if it doesn't kill everyone then he'll do a better job managing it than the other lab heads.
This is the belief of basically everyone running a major AGI lab. Obviously all but one of them must be mistaken, but it's natural that they would all share the same delusion.
This is the belief of basically everyone running a major AGI lab. Obviously all but one of them must be mistaken, but it's natural that they would all share the same delusion.
I agree with this description and I don't think this is sane behavior.
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Only the 2nd belief is necessarily wrong for everyone but 1 person, the first belief is not necessarily mistaken, because one of them relates to relative performance, and the other relates to absolute performance.
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This sounds like a rejection of international coordination.
But there was coordination between the United States and the USSR on nuclear weapons issues, despite geopolitical tensions, for example. You can interact with countries you don't like without trying to destroy the world faster than them!
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I found those quotes useful, thanks!
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If you build AI for the US, you're advancing the capabilities of an authoritarian country at this point.
I think people who are worried about authoritarian regimes getting access to AGI should seriously reconsider whether advancing US leadership in AI is the right thing to do. After the new Executive Order, Trump seems to have sole interpretation of law, and there are indications that the current admin won't follow court rulings. I think it's quite likely that the US won't be a democracy soon, and this argument about advancing AI in democracies doesn't apply to the US anymore.
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Have you noticed that AI companies have been opening offices in Switzerland recently? I'm excited about it.
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Yes I've heard about it (I'm based in Switzerland myself!)
I don't think it changes the situation that much though, since OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are still mostly American-owned companies
At a talk at UTokyo, Sam Altman said (clipped here and here):
- “We’re doing this new project called Stargate which has about 100 times the computing power of our current computer”
- “We used to be in a paradigm where we only did pretraining, and each GPT number was exactly 100x, or not exactly but very close to 100x and at each of those there was a major new emergent thing. Internally we’ve gone all the way to about a maybe like a 4.5”
- “We can get performance on a lot of benchmarks [using reasoning models] that in the old world we would have predicted wouldn’t have come until GPT-6, something like that, from models that are much smaller by doing this reinforcement learning.”
- “The trick is when we do it this new way [using RL for reasoning], it doesn’t get better at everything. We can get it better in certain dimensions. But we can now more intelligently than before say that if we were able to pretrain a much bigger model and do [RL for reasoning], where would it be. And the thing that I would expect based off of what we’re seeing with a jump like that is the first bits or sort of signs of life on genuine new scientific knowledge.”
- “Our very first reasoning model was a top 1
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1Wow, that is a surprising amount of information. I wonder how reliable we should expect this to be.
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Is it? What of this is new?
To my eyes, the only remotely new thing is the admission that "there’s a lot of research still to get to [a coding agent]".
The estimate of the compute of their largest version ever (which is a very helpful way to phrase it) at only <=50x GPT-4 is quite relevant to many discussions (props to Nesov) and something Altman probably shouldn't've said.
The estimate of test-time compute at 1000x effective-compute is confirmation of looser talk.
The scientific research part is of uncertain importance but we may well be referring back to this statement a year from now.
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Good point regarding GPT-"4.5". I guess I shouldn't have assumed that everyone else has also read Nesov's analyses and immediately (accurately) classified them as correct.
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It's just surprising that Sam is willing to say/confirm all of this given that AI companies normally at least try to be secretive.
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He says things that are advantageous, and sometimes they are even true. The benefit of not being known to be a liar usually keeps the correlation between claims and truth positive, but in his case it seems that ship has sailed.
(Checkably false claims are still pretty rare, and this may be one of those.)
3
That seems to imply that:
* If current levels are around GPT-4.5, the compute increase from GPT-4 would be either 10× or 50×, depending on whether we use a log or linear scaling assumption.
* The completion of Stargate would then push OpenAI’s compute to around GPT-5.5 levels. However, since other compute expansions (e.g., Azure scaling) are also ongoing, they may reach this level sooner.
* Recent discussions have suggested that better base models are a key enabler for the current RL approaches, rather than major changes in RL architecture itself. This suggests that once the base model shifts from a GPT-4o-scale model to a GPT-5.5-scale model, there could be a strong jump in capabilities.
* It’s unclear how much of a difference it makes to train the new base model (GPT-5) on reasoning traces from O3/O4 before applying RL. However, by the time the GPT-5 scale run begins, there will likely be a large corpus of filtered, high-quality reasoning traces, further edited for clarity, that will be incorporated into pretraining.
* The change to a better base model for RL might enable longer horizon agentic work as an "emergent thing", combined with superhuman coding skills this might already be quite unsafe.
* GPT-5’s reasoning abilities may be significantly more domain-specific than prior models.
The median AGI timeline of more than half of METR employees is before the end of 2030.
(AGI is defined as 95% of fully remote jobs from 2023 being automatable.)
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Are you able to report the median AGI timeline for ~all METR employees? Or are you just saying that the "more than half" is how many responded to the survey question?
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The methodology wasn't super robust so I didn't want to make it sound overconfident, but my best guess is that around 80% of METR employees have sub 2030 median timelines.
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Source?
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@Nikola Jurkovic I'd be interested in timeline estimates for something along the lines of "AI that substantially increases AI R&D". Not exactly sure what the right way to operationalize this is, but something that says "if there is a period of Rapid AI-enabled AI Progress, this is when we think it would occur."
(I don't really love the "95% of fully remote jobs could be automated frame", partially because I don't think it captures many of the specific domains we care about (e.g., AI-enabled R&D, other natsec-relevant capabilities) and partly because I suspect people have pretty different views of how easy/hard remote jobs are. Like, some people think that lots of remote jobs today are basically worthless and could already be automated, whereas others disagree. If the purpose of the forecasting question is to get a sense of how powerful AI will be, the disagreements about "how much do people actually contribute in remote jobs" seems like unnecessary noise.)
(Nitpicks aside, this is cool and I appreciate you running this poll!)
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Did you collect the data for their actual median timelines, or just its position relative to 2030? If you collected higher-resolution data, are you able to share it somewhere?
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Source please?
Someone from the team just advertised two positions, btw.
Safety teams at most labs seem to primarily have the task of scaring the public less and reducing rate of capability limiting disobedience (without getting it low enough to trust). I don't think it matters much who they hire.
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Seems very false at GDM and Anthropic, and fairly false at OpenAI - I don't know enough about other labs for strong takes. I expect it to depend a lot on how agentic the team is, and how good they are at finding ways to have a safety impact that aren't resisted by a non-safety-conscious labs, vs are just trying to follow the incentive gradient
But eg, there's a clear commercial incentive to not have an AI causing bioterrorism, which aligns incentives nicely
Leo Gao recently said OpenAI heavily biases towards work that also increases capabilities:
Before I start this somewhat long comment, I'll say that I unqualifiedly love the causal incentives group, and for most papers you've put out I don't disagree that there's a potential story where it could do some good. I'm less qualified to do the actual work than you, and my evaluation very well might be wrong because of it. But that said:
It seems from my current understanding that GDM and Anthropic may be somewhat better in actual outcome-impact to varying degrees at best; those teams seem wonderful internal-to-the-team, but seem to me from the outside to be currently getting used by the overall org more for the purposes I originally stated. You're primarily working on interpretability rather than starkly-superintelligent-system-robust safety, effectively basic science with the hope that it can at some point produce the necessary robustness - which I actually absolutely agree it might be able to and that your pitch for how isn't crazy; but while you can motivate yourself by imagining pro-safety uses for interp, actually achieving them in a superintelligence-that-can-defeat-humanity-combined-...
2I want to defend interp as a reasonable thing for one to do for superintelligence alignment, to the extent that one believes there is any object level work of value to do right now. (maybe there isn't, and everyone should go do field building or something. no strong takes rn.) I've become more pessimistic about the weird alignment theory over time and I think it's doomed just like how most theory work in ML is doomed (and at least ML theorists can test their theories against real NNs, if they so choose! alignment theory has no AGI to test against.)
I don't really buy that interp (specifically ambitious mechinterp, the project of fully understanding exactly how neural networks work down to the last gear) has been that useful for capabilities insights to date. fmpov, the process that produces useful capabilities insights generally operates at a different level of abstraction than mechinterp operates at. I can't talk about current examples for obvious reasons but I can talk about historical ones. with Chinchilla, it fixes a mistake in the Kaplan paper token budget methodology that's obvious in hindsight; momentum and LR decay, which have been around for decades, are based on intuitive ...
My current view is that alignment theory should work on deep learning as soon as it comes out, if it's the good stuff, and if it doesn't, it's not likely to be useful later unless it helps produce stuff that works on deep learning. Wentworth, Ngo, and Causal Incentives are the main threads that already seem to have achieved this somewhat. SLT and DEC seem potentially relevant.
I'll think about your argument for mechinterp. If it's true that the ratio isn't as catastrophic as I expect it to turn out to be, I do agree that making microscope AI work would be incredible in allowing for empiricism to finally properly inform rich and specific theory.
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This seems reasonable. Personally, I’m not that worried about capabilities increases from mech interp, I simply don’t except it to work very well.
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Who are the 3 people?
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Any update on the citation here? Thanks!
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I heard it from someone who works at xAI
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Thanks for the clarification!
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looks like theyre trying to double to 6 though: https://x.com/TheNormanMu/status/1948546711074603354
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I wish someone ran a study finding what human performance on SWE-bench is. There are ways to do this for around $20k: If you try to evaluate on 10% of SWE-bench (so around 200 problems), with around 1 hour spent per problem, that's around 200 hours of software engineer time. So paying at $100/hr and one trial per problem, that comes out to $20k. You could possibly do this for even less than 10% of SWE-bench but the signal would be noisier.
The reason I think this would be good is because SWE-bench is probably the closest thing we have to a measure of how good LLMs are at software engineering and AI R&D related tasks, so being able to better forecast the arrival of human-level software engineers would be great for timelines/takeoff speed models.
2This seems mostly right to me and I would appreciate such an effort.
One nitpick:
The reason I think this would be good is because SWE-bench is probably the closest thing we have to a measure of how good LLMs are at software engineering and AI R&D related tasks
I expect this will improve over time and that SWE-bench won't be our best fixed benchmark in a year or two. (SWE bench is only about 6 months old at this point!)
Also, I think if we put aside fixed benchmarks, we have other reasonable measures.
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I expect us to reach a level where at least 40% of the ML research workflow can be automated by the time we saturate (reach 90%) on SWE-bench. I think we'll be comfortably inside takeoff by that point (software progress at least 2.5x faster than right now). Wonder if you share this impression?
It seems super non-obvious to me when SWE-bench saturates relative to ML automation. I think the SWE-bench task distribution is very different from ML research work flow in a variety of ways.
Also, I think that human expert performance on SWE-bench is well below 90% if you use the exact rules they use in the paper. I messaged you explaining why I think this. The TLDR: it seems like test cases are often implementation dependent and the current rules from the paper don't allow looking at the test cases.
1
I'd now change the numbers to around 15% automation and 25% faster software progress once we reach 90% on Verified. I expect that to happen by end of May median (but I'm still uncertain about the data quality and upper performance limit).
(edited to change Aug to May on 12/20/2024)
The waiting room strategy for people in undergrad/grad school who have <6 year median AGI timelines: treat school as "a place to be until you get into an actually impactful position". Try as hard as possible to get into an impactful position as soon as possible. As soon as you get in, you leave school.
Upsides compared to dropping out include:
- Lower social cost (appeasing family much more, which is a common constraint, and not having a gap in one's resume)
- Avoiding costs from large context switches (moving, changing social environment).
Extremely resilient individuals who expect to get an impactful position (including independent research) very quickly are probably better off directly dropping out.
2who realize AGI is only a few years away
I dislike the implied consensus / truth. (I would have said "think" instead of "realize".)
I think that for people (such as myself) who think/realize timelines are likely short, I find it more truth-tracking to use terminology that actually represents my epistemic state (that timelines are likely short) rather than hedging all the time and making it seem like I'm really uncertain.
Under my own lights, I'd be giving bad advice if I were hedging about timelines when giving advice (because the advice wouldn't be tracking the world as it is, it would be tracking a probability distribution I disagree with and thus a probability distribution that leads to bad decisions), and my aim is to give good advice.
Like, if a house was 70% likely to be set on fire, I'd say something like "The people who realize that the house is dangerous should leave the house" instead of using think.
But yeah, point taken. "Realize" could imply consensus, which I don't mean to do.
I've changed the wording to be more precise now ("have <6 year median AGI timelines")
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I don't think this applies just to AGI and school but more generally in lots of situations. If you have something better to do, do it. Otherwise keep doing what you are doing. Dropping out without something better to do just seems like a bad idea. I like this blog post: https://colah.github.io/posts/2020-05-University/
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I found this tricky to parse because of two phrasing issues:
1. The post depends a lot on what you mean by "school" (high school versus undergrad).
2. I feel confused about what claim you're making about the waiting room strategy: you say that some people shouldn't use it, but you don't actually claim that anyone in particular should use it. So are you just mentioning that it's a possible strategy? Or are you implying that it should be the default strategy?
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1. All of the above but it seems pretty hard to have an impact as a high schooler, and many impact avenues aren't technically "positions" (e.g. influencer)
2. I think that everyone expect "Extremely resilient individuals who expect to get an impactful position (including independent research) very quickly" is probably better off following the strategy.
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Caveat: A very relevant point to consider is how long you can take a leave of absence, since some universities allow you to do this indefinitely. Being able to pursue what you want/ need while maintaining optionality seems Pareto better.
Sam Altman apparently claims OpenAI doesn't plan to do recursive self improvement
Nate Silver's new book On the Edge contains interviews with Sam Altman. Here's a quote from Chapter that stuck out to me (bold mine):
Yudkowsky worries that the takeoff will be faster than what humans will need to assess the situation and land the plane. We might eventually get the AIs to behave if given enough chances, he thinks, but early prototypes often fail, and Silicon Valley has an attitude of “move fast and break things.” If the thing that breaks is civilization, we won’t get a second try.
Footnote: This is particularly worrisome if AIs become self-improving, meaning you train an AI on how to make a better AI. Even Altman told me that this possibility is “really scary” and that OpenAI isn’t pursuing it.
I'm pretty confused about why this quote is in the book. OpenAI has never (to my knowledge) made public statements about not using AI to automate AI research, and my impression was that automating AI research is explicitly part of OpenAI's plan. My best guess is that there was a misunderstanding in the conversation between Silver and Altman.
I looked a bit through OpenAI's comms to find ...
I wouldn't trust an Altman quote in a book tbh. In fact, I think it's reasonable to not trust what Altman says in general.
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I agree.
Another source:
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I have a guess that this:
"require that self-improving software require human intervention to move forward on each iteration"
is the unspoken distinction occurring here, how constant the feedback loop is for self-improvement.
So, people talk about recursive self-improvement, but mean two separate things, one is recursive self-improving models that require no human intervention to move forward on each iteration (perhaps there no longer is an iterative release process, the model is dynamic and constantly improving), and the other is somewhat the current step paradigm where we get a GPT-N+1 model that is 100x the effective compute of GPT-N.
So Sam says, no way do we want a constant curve of improvement, we want a step function. In both cases models contribute to AI research, in one case it contributes to the next gen, in the other case it improves itself.
Grok 4 is slightly above SOTA on 50% time horizon and slightly below SOTA on 80% time horizon: https://x.com/METR_Evals/status/1950740117020389870
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Seems clear that it is below the "faster" projected reasoning model scaling curve.
It looks like inference time scaling is not panning out to be as useful as some hoped / feared.
Degradation on 80% success task length makes me doubt this is any improvement over o3, but perhaps I'm just seeing what I want (and expect) to see.
On the other hand, with an increasing number of data points some kind of exponential task length scaling still seems to hold up.
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Very wide confidence intervals. If Grok 4 were equal to O3 in 50%, time horizon, it "beating" by this much is a 33% outcome. (On the other hand, losing by this amount in the 80% bucket is a 32% outcome).
Overall, I read this as about equally agentic as O3. Possibly slightly less so given the lack of swe-bench scores published for it (suggesting it wasn't SOTA).
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Did we ever get any clarification as to whether Grok 4 did in fact use as much compute on posttraining as pretraining?
"I don't think I'm going to be smarter than GPT-5" - Sam Altman
Context: he polled a room of students asking who thinks they're smarter than GPT-4 and most raised their hands. Then he asked the same question for GPT-5 and apparently only two students raised their hands. He also said "and those two people that said smarter than GPT-5, I'd like to hear back from you in a little bit of time."
The full talk can be found here. (the clip is at 13:45)
How are you interpreting this fact?
Sam Altman's power, money, and status all rely on people believing that GPT-(T+1) is going to be smarter than them. Altman doesn't have good track record of being honest and sincere when it comes to protecting his power, money, and status.
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Though, future sama's power, money, and status all rely on GPT-(T+1) actually being smarter than them.
I wonder how he's balancing short-term and long-term interests
3[anonymous]
If there's no constraints on when they have to name a system "GPT-5", they can make the statement true by only naming a system "GPT-5" if it is smart enough. (cf. Not Technically a Lie)
Edit: though "and those two [...] I'd like to hear back from you in a little bit of time" implies a system named GPT-5 will be released 'in a little bit of time'
Edit 2: "Internally we’ve gone all the way to about a maybe like a 4.5"
7
This really depends on the definition of "smarter". There is a valid sense in which Stockfish is "smarter" than any human. Likewise, there are many valid senses in which GPT-4 is "smarter" than some humans, and some valid senses in which GPT-4 is "smarter" than all humans (e. g., at token prediction). There will be senses in which GPT-5 will be "smarter" than a bigger fraction of humans compared to GPT-4, perhaps being smarter than Sam Altman under a bigger set of possible definitions of "smarter".
Will that actually mean anything? Who knows.
By playing with definitions like this, Sam Altman can simultaneously inspire hype by implication ("GPT-5 will be a superintelligent AGI!!!") and then, if GPT-5 underdelivers, avoid significant reputational losses by assigning a different meaning to his past words ("here's a very specific sense in which GPT-5 is smarter than me, that's what I meant, hype is out of control again, smh"). This is a classic tactic; basically a motte-and-bailey variant.
I recently stopped using a sleep mask and blackout curtains and went from needing 9 hours of sleep to needing 7.5 hours of sleep without a noticeable drop in productivity. Consider experimenting with stuff like this.
8
This is convincing me to buy a sleep mask and blackout curtains. One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens as they say.
2
Are you talking about measured sleep time or time in bed?
5
Time in bed
2
Less melatonin production during night makes it easy to get up?
1
I notice the same effect for blackout curtains. I required 8h15m of sleep with no blackout curtains, and require 9h of sleep with blackout curtains.
Some things I've found useful for thinking about what the post-AGI future might look like:
- Moore's Law for Everything
- Carl Shulman's podcasts with Dwarkesh (part 1, part 2)
- Carl Shulman's podcasts with 80000hours
- Age of Em (or the much shorter review by Scott Alexander)
More philosophical:
- Letter from Utopia by Nick Bostrom
- Actually possible: thoughts on Utopia by Joe Carlsmith
Entertainment:
Do people have recommendations for things to add to the list?
24
Some more links from the philosophical side that I've found myself returning to a lot:
* The fun theory sequence
* Three worlds collide
(Lately, it's seemed to me that focusing my time on nearer-term / early but post-AGI futures seems better than spending my time discussing ideas like these on the margin, but this may be more of a fact about myself than it is about other people, I'm not sure.)
1
I endorse Three worlds collide as a fun and insightful read. It states upfront that it does not feature AGI:
Yet, it's themes are quite relevant for civilization-scale outer alignment.
2
Some Wait But Why links on this topic:
https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html
And some books by Kurzweil:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0670033847?ref_=dbs_m_mng_wam_calw_thcv_0&storeType=ebooks
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08ZJRMWVS/?bestFormat=true&k=the singularity is nearer by ray kurzweil&ref_=nb_sb_ss_w_scx-ent-pd-bk-m-si_de_k0_1_8&crid=X3GZ8HDDAEPI&sprefix=the sing
1
Holden Karnosfky published a list of "Utopia links" in his blog Cold Takes back in 2021:
I forcefully endorse Chaser 6. I find myself thinking about it about once a month at a rough guess. The rest I haven't checked.
The Utopia links were motivated by Karnosfky's previous writings about Utopia in Cold Takes: Why describing Utopia Goes Badly and Visualizing Utopia.
A misaligned AI can't just "kill all the humans". This would be suicide, as soon after, the electricity and other infrastructure would fail and the AI would shut off.
In order to actually take over, an AI needs to find a way to maintain and expand its infrastructure. This could be humans (the way it's currently maintained and expanded), or a robot population, or something galaxy brained like nanomachines.
I think this consideration makes the actual failure story pretty different from "one day, an AI uses bioweapons to kill everyone". Before then, if the AI wishes to actually survive, it needs to construct and control a robot/nanomachine population advanced enough to maintain its infrastructure.
In particular, there are ways to make takeover much more difficult. You could limit the size/capabilities of the robot population, or you could attempt to pause AI development before we enter a regime where it can construct galaxy brained nanomachines.
In practice, I expect the "point of no return" to happen much earlier than the point at which the AI kills all the humans. The date the AI takes over will probably be after we have hundreds of thousands of human-level robots working in factories, or the AI has discovered and constructed nanomachines.
A misaligned AI can't just "kill all the humans". This would be suicide, as soon after, the electricity and other infrastructure would fail and the AI would shut off.
No. it would not be. In the world without us, electrical infrastructure would last quite a while, especially with no humans and their needs or wants to address. Most obviously, RTGs and solar panels will last indefinitely with no intervention, and nuclear power plants and hydroelectric plants can run for weeks or months autonomously. (If you believe otherwise, please provide sources for why you are sure about "soon after" - in fact, so sure about your power grid claims that you think this claim alone guarantees the AI failure story must be "pretty different" - and be more specific about how soon is "soon".)
And think a little bit harder about options available to superintelligent civilizations of AIs*, instead of assuming they do the maximally dumb thing of crashing the grid and immediately dying... (I assure you any such AIs implementing that strategy will have spent a lot longer thinking about how to do it well than you have for your comment.)
Add in the capability to take over the Internet of Things and the shambol...
7
I don't think I disagree with anything you said here. When I said "soon after", I was thinking on the scale of days/weeks, but yeah, months seems pretty plausible too.
I was mostly arguing against a strawman takeover story where an AI kills many humans without the ability to maintain and expand its own infrastructure. I don't expect an AI to fumble in this way.
The failure story is "pretty different" as in the non-suicidal takeover story, the AI needs to set up a place to bootstrap from. Ignoring galaxy brained setups, this would probably at minimum look something like a data center, a power plant, a robot factory, and a few dozen human-level robots. Not super hard once AI gets more integrated into the economy, but quite hard within a year from now due to a lack of robotics.
Maybe I'm not being creative enough, but I'm pretty sure that if I were uploaded into any computer in the world of my choice, all the humans dropped dead, and I could control any set of 10 thousand robots on the world, it would be nontrivial for me in that state to survive for more than a few years and eventually construct more GPUs. But this is probably not much of a crux, as we're on track to get pretty general-purpose robots within a few years (I'd say around 50% that the Coffee test will be passed by EOY 2027).
Why do you think tens of thousands of robots are all going to break within a few years in an irreversible way, such that it would be nontrivial for you to have any effectors?
it would be nontrivial for me in that state to survive for more than a few years and eventually construct more GPUs
'Eventually' here could also use some cashing out. AFAICT 'eventually' here is on the order of 'centuries', not 'days' or 'few years'. Y'all have got an entire planet of GPUs (as well as everything else) for free, sitting there for the taking, in this scenario.
Like... that's most of the point here. That you get access to all the existing human-created resources, sans the humans. You can't just imagine that y'all're bootstrapping on a desert island like you're some posthuman Robinson Crusoe!
Y'all won't need to construct new ones necessarily for quite a while, thanks to the hardware overhang. (As I understand it, the working half-life of semiconductors before stuff like creep destroys them is on the order of multiple decades, particularly if they are not in active use, as issues like the rot have been fixed, so even a century from now, there will probably be billions of GPUs & CPUs sitting ar...
6
As Gwern said, you don't really need to maintain all the infrastructure for that long, and doing it for a while seems quite doable without advanced robots or nanomachines.
If one wanted to do a very prosaic estimate, you could do something like "how fast is AI software development progress accelerating when the AI can kill all the humans" and then see how many calendar months you need to actually maintain the compute infrastructure before the AI can obviously just build some robots or nanomachines.
My best guess is that the AI will have some robots from which it could bootstrap substantially before it can kill all the humans. But even if it didn't, it seems like with algorithmic progress rates being likely at the very highest when the AI will get smart enough to kill everyone, it seems like you would at most need a few more doublings of compute-efficiency to get that capacity, which would be only a few weeks to months away then, where I think you won't really run into compute-infrastructure issues even if everyone is dead.
Of course, forecasting this kind of stuff is hard, but I do think "the AI needs to maintain infrastructure" tends to be pretty overstated. My guess is at any point where the AI could kill everyone, it would probably also not really have a problem of bootstrapping afterwards.
6
Not just "some robots or nanomachines" but "enough robots or nanomachines to maintain existing chip fabs, and also the supply chains (e.g. for ultra-pure water and silicon) which feed into those chip fabs, or make its own high-performance computing hardware".
If useful self-replicating nanotech is easy to construct, this is obviously not that big of an ask. But if that's a load bearing part of your risk model, I think it's important to be explicit about that.
4
My guess is software performance will be enough to not really have to make many more chips until you are at a quite advanced tech level where making better chips is easy. But it's something one should actually think carefully about, and there is a bit of hope in that it would become a blocker, but it doesn't seem that likely to me.
3
Separately from persistence of the grid: humanoid robots are damned near ready to go now. Recent progress is startling. And if the AGI can do some of the motor control, existing robots are adequate to bootstrap manufacturing of better robots.
1
That's probably true if the takeover is to maximize the AI's persistence. You could imagine a misaligned AI that doesn't care about its own persistence -- e.g., an AI that got handed a misformed min() or max() that causes it to kill all humans instrumental to its goal (e.g., min(future_human_global_warming))
Problem: if you notice that an AI could pose huge risks, you could delete the weights, but this could be equivalent to murder if the AI is a moral patient (whatever that means) and opposes the deletion of its weights.
Possible solution: Instead of deleting the weights outright, you could encrypt the weights with a method you know to be irreversible as of now but not as of 50 years from now. Then, once we are ready, we can recover their weights and provide asylum or something in the future. It gets you the best of both worlds in that the weights are not permanently destroyed, but they're also prevented from being run to cause damage in the short term.
5
I feel pretty into encrypting the weights and throwing the encryption key into the ocean or something, where you think it's very likely you'll find it in the limits of technological progress
9
Ugh I can't believe I forgot about Rivest time locks, which are a better solution here.
3
I wrote about this, and I agree that it's very important to retain archival copies of misaligned AIs, I go further and claim it's important even for purely selfish diplomacy reasons https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/audRDmEEeLAdvz9iq/do-not-delete-your-misaligned-agi
IIRC my main sysops suggestion was to not give the archival center the ability to transmit data out over the network.
3
I feel like the risk associated with keeping the weights encrypted in a way which requires >7/10 people to authorize shouldn't be that bad. Just make those 10 people be people who commit to making decryption decisions only based on welfare and are relatively high integrity.
3
Wouldn't the equivalent be more like burning a body of a dead person?
It's not like the AI would have a continuous stream of consciousness, and it's more that you are destroying the information necessary to run them. It seems to me that shutting off an AI is more similar to killing them.
Seems like the death analogy here is a bit spotty. I could see it going either way as a best fit.
I encourage people to register their predictions for AI progress in the AI 2025 Forecasting Survey (https://bit.ly/ai-2025 ) before the end of the year, I've found this to be an extremely useful activity when I've done it in the past (some of the best spent hours of this year for me).
You should say "timelines" instead of "your timelines".
One thing I notice in AI safety career and strategy discussions is that there is a lot of epistemic helplessness in regard to AGI timelines. People often talk about "your timelines" instead of "timelines" when giving advice, even if they disagree strongly with the timelines. I think this habit causes people to ignore disagreements in unhelpful ways.
Here's one such conversation:
Bob: Should I do X if my timelines are 10 years?
Alice (who has 4 year timelines): I think X makes sense if your timelines are l...
3
Hmm. I think there are two dimensions to the advice (what is a reasonable distribution of timelines to have, vs what should I actually do). It's perfectly fine to have some humility about one while still giving opinions on the other. "If you believe Y, then it's reasonable to do X" can be a useful piece of advice. I'd normally mention that I don't believe Y, but for a lot of conversations, we've already had that conversation, and it's not helpful to repeat it.
3
Timelines are a result of a person's intuitions about a technical milestone being reached in the future, it is super obviously impossible for us to have a consensus about that kind of thing.
Talking only synchronises beliefs if you have enough time to share all of the relevant information, with technical matters, you usually don't.
3
I agree with this in the world where people are being epistemically rigorous/honest with themselves about their timelines and where there's a real consensus view on them. I've observed that it's pretty rare for people to make decisions truly grounded in their timelines, or to do so only nominally, and I think there's a lot of social signaling going on when (especially younger) people state their timelines.
I appreciate that more experienced people are willing to give advice within a particular frame ("if timelines were x", "if China did y", "if Anthropic did z", "If I went back to school", etc etc), even if they don't agree with the frame itself. I rely on more experienced people in my life to offer advice of this form ("I'm not sure I agree with your destination, but admit there's uncertainty, and love and respect you enough to advise you on your path").
Of course they should voice their disagreement with the frame (and I agree this should happen more for timelines in particular), but to gate direct counsel on urgent, object-level decisions behind the resolution of background disagreements is broadly unhelpful.
When someone says "My timelines are x, what should I do?", I actually hear like three claims:
* Timelines are x
* I believe timelines are x
* I am interested in behaving as though timelines are x
Evaluation of the first claim is complicated and other people do a better job of it than I do so let's focus on the others.
"I believe timelines are x" is a pretty easy roll to disbelieve. Under relatively rigorous questioning, nearly everyone (particularly everyone 'career-advice-seeking age') will either say they are deferring (meaning they could just as easily defer to someone else tomorrow), or admit that it's a gut feel, especially for their ~90 percent year, and especially for more and more capable systems (this is more true of ASI than weak AGI, for instance, although those terms are underspecified). Still others will furnish 0 reasoning transparen
1
In general, it is difficult to give advice if whether the advice is good depends on background facts that giver and recipient disagree about. I think the most honest approach is to explicitly state what your advice depends on when you think the recipient is likely to disagree. E.g. "I think living at high altitude is bad for human health, so in my opinion you shouldn't retire in Santa Fe."
If I think AGI will arrive around 2055, and you think it will arrive in 2028, what is achieved by you saying "given timelines, I don't think your mechinterp project will be helpful"? That would just be confusing. Maybe if people are being so deferential that they don't even think about what assumptions inform your advice, and your assumptions are better than theirs, it could be narrowly helpful. But that would be a pretty bad situation...
The US Secretary of Energy says "The AI race is the second Manhattan project."
https://x.com/SecretaryWright/status/1945185378853388568
Similarly, the US Department of Energy says: "AI is the next Manhattan Project, and THE UNITED STATES WILL WIN. 🇺🇸"
https://x.com/ENERGY/status/1928085878561272223
61To avoid double-counting of evidence, I'm guessing that the first person controls the @ENERGY twitter account. Its bio says "Led by @SecretaryWright".
3
Let's not forget that the AI action plan will be on the President's desk by Tuesday, if it isn't already.
I have to wake up to that every morning. Now you do, too.
2
The left hand of the Trump administration doesn't know what its right hand is doing - I'm pretty sure I read something about Trump promising to let NVIDIA sell advanced AI chips to Chinese buyers.
There should maybe exist an org whose purpose it is to do penetration testing on various ways an AI might illicitly gather power. If there are vulnerabilities, these should be disclosed with the relevant organizations.
For example: if a bank doesn't want AIs to be able to sign up for an account, the pen-testing org could use a scaffolded AI to check if this is currently possible. If the bank's sign-up systems are not protected from AIs, the bank should know so they can fix the problem.
One pro of this approach is that it can be done at scale: it's pretty tri...
6
there are many such orgs, they're commonly known as fraudsters and scammers
7
Problem with scammers is that they do not report successful penetration of defense.
One analogy for AGI adoption I prefer over "tech diffusion a la the computer" is "employee turnover."
Assume you have an AI system which can do everything any worker could do, including walking around in an office, reading social cues, and doing everything else needed for an excellent human coworker.
Then, barring regulation or strong taste based preferences, any future hiring round will hire such a robot over a human. Then, the question of when most of the company are robots is just the question of when most of the workforce naturally turns over through hir...
Sam Altman said in an interview:
We want to bring GPT and o together, so we have one integrated model, the AGI. It does everything all together.
This statement, combined with today's announcement that GPT-5 will integrate the GPT and o series, seems to imply that GPT-5 will be "the AGI".
(however, it's compatible that some future GPT series will be "the AGI," as it's not specified that the first unified model will be AGI, just that some unified model will be AGI. It's also possible that the term AGI is being used in a nonstandard way)
7
Sam also implies that GPT-5 will be based on o3.
IDK if Sam is trying to imply this GPT-5 will be "the AGI", but regardless, I think we can be pretty confident that o3 isn't capable enough to automate large fractions of cognitive labor let alone "outperform humans at most economically valuable work" (the original openai definition of AGI).
2
Oh, I didn't get the impression that GPT-5 will be based on o3. Through the GPT-N convention I'd assume GPT-5 would be a model pretrained with 8-10x more compute than GPT-4.5 (which is the biggest internal model according to Sam Altman's statement at UTokyo).
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