Putting together an article, for now here's 22 predictions:
Tether is worth less than 99c by end of year: 2%
Biden or Harris mentions GPT-4: 2%
At least one school district or university is reported to tell students not to use language models (not just one teacher): 15%
A deepfake goes viral (>1 million views) with very few people, at first, realizing that it's fake: 15%
Russia is widely considered to have captured the capital of Ukraine, Kyiv: 10%
S&P 500 goes up: 80%
Annual CPI inflation released Jan 2023 (for Dec 2022) over 3.5%: 40%
The 7 day rolling average deaths from Covid-19 falls below 100 in the United States for at least one day: 85%
Omicron booster is taken by at least 25% of Americans over 18: 20%
Dems lose the Senate: 75%
Dems lose the house: 85%
Biden is president: 95%
New named prominent variant infects over 10M: 25%
Will the US rejoin the Iran Nuclear Deal before 2023: 25%
Bill signed by Joe Biden that mentions cryptocurrency/blockchain/etc: 65%
Bored Ape Yacht Club floor price is lower than today in dollars ($253k): 80%
Will GME be over $100: 50%
Trump indictment: 25%
Matt Gaetz indictment: 5%
Matt Gaetz in office: 95%
Federal booster mandate: 33%
Masks required on airplanes by Federal law: 65%
I haven't thought for more than a minute or so about each of these, so they are pretty shitty in both resolution conditions and calibration/accuracy, but I'm putting them up anyway since it's better than nothing (and also because that way maybe someone else will come along and improve on them):
1. OpenAI total annual revenue from large neural nets either remains unknown or is credibly estimated to be less than $100M: 70%
2. MMLU SOTA above 70% like Brundage says: 50%
3. Some sort of Diplomacy AI (with press) milestone is achieved: 50%
4. Trillion-parameter dense models trained on at least 200b tokens exist: 70%
5. At least a million people are involved in some sort of political or ideological AI persuasion learning process (as opposed to e.g. advertising or engagement-maximizing) such as those described here and here: 30%
6. At least a million Americans are involved in... etc.: 15%
What does it mean to be "involved in"? @ike suggested that a deepfake could go viral. Suppose there was a deepfake that had a political purpose, like a fake video involving a politician. If a million people view it, is that "involved"?
Good question. I meant involved in some sort of automated learning process, such as RL. Like, data is automatically collected about the million humans' behavior and then automatically used to adjust the weights of some neural network that feeds those humans information, repeat.
Yes. For example, recommendation algorithms count as this I think, except that they aren't currently being optimized to persuade towards anything ideological or political; they merely persuade you to be more engaged, buy more products, report higher user satisfaction, etc.
Kids go back to school in the fall with no Covid restrictions more onerous than a vaccine mandate: 60%
Indoor dining and other adult activities (bars, events, etc.) have no Covid rules by September 1: 90%
Edit note: above predictions are for the United States, and apply to "the vast majority of people." To put a post-hoc number on it, at least 85% of people will have the above state, though there might be a few locations that hold out. Or there is a new development / federal guidance doesn't change and 60%+ of people are still under restrictions - which would be the 40% side of the prediction.
Do you mean these to apply at the level of the federal government? At the level of that + a majority of states? Majority of states weighted by population? All states?
This is a thread for anyone to post predictions for 2022.
(Inspired by similar threads LW has done in the past, and also by Scott Alexander's yearly tradition and by Miles Brundage's predictions about AI)