Surprising Things AGI Forecasting Experts Agree On:
I hesitate to say this because it's putting words in other people's mouths, and thus I may be misrepresenting them. I beg forgiveness if so and hope to be corrected. (I'm thinking especially of Paul Christiano and Ajeya Cotra here, but also maybe Rohin and Buck and Richard and some other people)
1. Slow takeoff means things accelerate and go crazy before we get to human-level AGI. It does not mean that after we get to human-level AGI, we still have some non-negligible period where they are gradually getting smarter and available for humans to study and interact with. In other words, people seem to agree that once we get human-level AGI, there'll be a FOOM of incredibly fast recursive self-improvement.
2. The people with 30-year timelines (as suggested by the Cotra report) tend to agree with the 10-year timelines people that by 2030ish there will exist human-brain-sized artificial neural nets that are superhuman at pretty much all short-horizon tasks. This will have all sorts of crazy effects on the world. The disagreement is over whether this will lead to world GDP doubling in four years or less, whether this will lead to strategically aware agentic AGI (e.g. Carlsmith's notion of APS-AI), etc.
I disagree with the first one. I think that the spectrum of human-level AGI is actually quite wide, and that for most tasks we'll get AGIs that are better than most humans significantly before we get AGIs that are better than all humans. But the latter is much more relevant for recursive self-improvement, because it's bottlenecked by innovation, which is driven primarily by the best human researchers. E.g. I think it'd be pretty difficult to speed up AI progress dramatically using millions of copies of an average human.
Also, by default I think people talk ... (read more)
Less relevant now, but I got the "few years" from the post you linked. There Christiano talked about another gap than AGI -> ASI, but since overall he seems to expect linear progress, I thought my conclusion was reasonable. In retrospect, I shouldn't have made that comment.
1Heighn
Thanks for offering your view Paul, and I apologize if I misrepresented your view.