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Looking back, history feels easy to predict; hindsight + the hard work of historians makes it (feel) easy to pinpoint the key portents. Given what we think about AI risk, in hindsight, might this have been the most disturbing development of 2020 thus far?
I personally lean towards "no", because this scaling seemed somewhat predictable from GPT-2 (flag - possible hindsight bias), and because 2020 has been so awful so far. But it seems possible, at least. I don't really know what update GPT-3 is to my AI risk estimates & timelines.
DL so far has been easy to predict - if you bought into a specific theory of connectionism & scaling espoused by Schmidhuber, Moravec, Sutskever, and a few others, as I point out in https://www.gwern.net/newsletter/2019/13#what-progress & https://www.gwern.net/newsletter/2020/05#gpt-3 . Even the dates are more or less correct! The really surprising thing is that that particular extreme fringe lunatic theory turned out to be correct. So the question is, was everyone else wrong for the right reasons (similar to the Greeks dismissing heliocentrism for... (read more)