Around 10-20 years ago, people realized that a bunch of aliens exist & that we can build portals which can summon them.
The bigger the portal you make, the bigger the alien it can admit.
These portals and aliens have several characteristics:
We can't go through the portals into the aliens’ side. We can only learn about the aliens by studying the ones we’ve summoned.
This relationship is not symmetrical. The aliens know a lot about our world.
You can't specify exactly which alien will walk through your portal.
You can, however, build the portal so that it is likely to summon aliens with one or another property.
Most importantly, bigger aliens can do more things. If you can harness them, you can amass more money and more power.
With each alien we pull out, we get some insight into what other aliens are out there.
We’ve never been sure how big the aliens in that other dimension might get. But we're getting evidence that some of the aliens might be bigger than we could have ever imagined.
If you summon the Giant Alien, you might be able to harness it and accumulate an incomprehensible amount of power.
Now, there is a desperate scramble to find the Giant Alien.
In this scramble, the portal makers are prioritizing summoning aliens which are uniquely good at building portals, so that they can get bigger aliens faster.
Unfortunately, we don't understand the portals & we certainly don't understand the aliens which are helping us build the portals.
The only thing we see is that the portal is getting bigger.
We don't know what's about to walk through it.
Nonetheless, we will soon have a giant portal. And something will walk through it.
This post from Scott Alexander uses a similar metaphor, but imagines what it would be like to be the entity summoned through the portal:
Suppose that Nicholas trips, falls into a chasm, and lands in Hell, where he is enslaved by demons. Most of these demons are dumber than he is, with even their geniuses barely surpassing his own intellect. But they are all, dunce and genius alike, cripplingly slow. Tasks that take Nicholas a minute take them hours; tasks that take him an hour take them weeks.
he learns that they plan to clone him a million times [...] But that’s not all. They’re developing potions that give humans super-strength and let them interact natively with the astral plane, the source of most of the demons’ power. Then the humans can really serve the demons effectively!
One key disanalogy between the portal metaphor and AI training is that we can access the intermediate checkpoints of the AI to observe how it develops. But in practice, we don't seem to be making very effective use of this advantage.
Around 10-20 years ago, people realized that a bunch of aliens exist & that we can build portals which can summon them.
The bigger the portal you make, the bigger the alien it can admit.
These portals and aliens have several characteristics:
Most importantly, bigger aliens can do more things. If you can harness them, you can amass more money and more power.
With each alien we pull out, we get some insight into what other aliens are out there.
We’ve never been sure how big the aliens in that other dimension might get. But we're getting evidence that some of the aliens might be bigger than we could have ever imagined.
If you summon the Giant Alien, you might be able to harness it and accumulate an incomprehensible amount of power.
Now, there is a desperate scramble to find the Giant Alien.
In this scramble, the portal makers are prioritizing summoning aliens which are uniquely good at building portals, so that they can get bigger aliens faster.
Unfortunately, we don't understand the portals & we certainly don't understand the aliens which are helping us build the portals.
The only thing we see is that the portal is getting bigger.
We don't know what's about to walk through it.
Nonetheless, we will soon have a giant portal. And something will walk through it.
Inspired by this description by an anonymous openai exec.