ESRogs

Engineer at CoinList.co. Donor to LW 2.0.

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Happiness has been shown to increase with income up to a certain threshold ($ 200K per year now, roughly speaking), beyond which the effect tends to plateau.

Do you have a citation for this? My understanding is that it's a logarithmic relationship — there's no threshold. (See the Income & Happiness section here.)

Why antisocial? I think it's great!

I would imagine one of the major factors explaining Tesla's absence is that people are most worried about LLMs at the moment, and Tesla is not a leader in LLMs.

(I agree that people often seem to overlook Tesla as a leader in AI in general.)

I don't know anything about the 'evaluation platform developed by Scale AI—at the AI Village at DEFCON 31'.

Looks like it's this.

Here are some predictions—mostly just based on my intuitions, but informed by the framework above. I predict with >50% credence that by the end of 2025 neural nets will:

To clarify, I think you mean that you predict each of these individually with >50% credence, not that you predict all of them jointly with >50% credence. Is that correct?

I'd like to see open-sourced evaluation and safety tools. Seems like a good thing to push on.

My model here is something like "even small differences in the rate at which systems are compounding power and/or intelligence lead to gigantic differences in absolute power and/or intelligence, given that the world is moving so fast."

Or maybe another way to say it: the speed at which a given system can compound it's abilities is very fast, relative to the rate at which innovations diffuse through the economy, for other groups and other AIs to take advantage of.

I'm a bit skeptical of this. While I agree that small differences in growth rates can be very meaningful, I think it's quite difficult to maintain a growth rate faster than the rest of the world for an extended period of time.

Growth and Trade

The reason is that: growth is way easier if you engage in trade. And assuming that gains from trade are shared evenly, the rest of the world profits just as much (in absolute terms) as you do from any trade. So you can only grow significantly faster than the rest of the world while you're small relative to the size of the whole world.

To give a couple of illustrative examples:

  • The "Asian Tigers" saw their economies grow faster than GWP during the second half of the 20th century because they were engaged in "catch-up" growth. Once their GDP per capita got into the same ballpark as other developed countries, they slowed down to a similar growth rate to those countries.
  • Tesla has grown revenue at an average of 50% per year for 10 years. That's been possible because they started out as a super small fraction of all car sales, and there were many orders of magnitude of growth available. I expect them to continue growing at something close to that rate for another 5-10 years, but then they'll slow down because the global car market is only so big.

Growth without Trade

Now imagine that you're a developing nation, or a nascent car company, and you want to try to grow your economy, or the number of cars you make, but you're not allowed to trade with anyone else.

For a nation it sounds possible, but you're playing on super hard mode. For a car company it sounds impossible.

Hypotheses

This suggests to me the following hypotheses:

  1. Any entity that tries to grow without engaging in trade is going to be outcompeted by those that do trade, but
  2. Entities that grow via trade will have their absolute growth capped at the size of the absolute growth of the rest of the world, and thus their growth rate will max out at the same rate as the rest of the world, once they're an appreciable fraction of the global economy.

I don't think these hypotheses are necessarily true in every case, but it seems like they would tend to be true. So to me that makes a scenario where explosive growth enables an entity to pull away from the rest of the world seem a bit less likely.

I suppose a possible mistake in this analysis is that I'm treating Moore's law as the limit on compute growth rates, and this may not hold once we have stronger AIs helping to design and fabricate chips.

Even so, I think there's something to be said for trying to slowly close the compute overhang gap over time.

0.2 OOMs/year was the pre-AlexNet growth rate in ML systems.

I think you'd want to set the limit to something slightly faster than Moore's law. Otherwise you have a constant large compute overhang.

Ultimately, we're going to be limited by Moore's law (or its successor) growth rates eventually anyway. We're on a kind of z-curve right now, where we're transitioning from ML compute being some small constant fraction of all compute to some much larger constant fraction of all compute. Before the transition it grows at the same speed as compute in general. After the transition it also grows at the same speed as compute in general. In the middle it grows faster as we rush to spend a much larger share of GWP on it.

From that perspective, Moore's law growth is the minimum growth rate you might have (unless annual spend on ML shrinks). And the question is just whether you transition from the small constant fraction of all compute to the large constant fraction of all compute slowly or quickly.

Trying to not do the transition at all (i.e. trying to growing at exactly the same rate as compute in general) seems potentially risky, because the resulting constant compute overhang means it's relatively easy for someone somewhere to rush ahead locally and build something much better than SOTA.

If on the other hand, you say full steam ahead and don't try to slow the transition at all, then on the plus side the compute overhang goes away, but on the minus side, you might rush into dangerous and destabilizing capabilities.

Perhaps a middle path makes sense, where you slow the growth rate down from current levels, but also slowly close the compute overhang gap over time.

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