Timothy Lillicrap, a staff research scientist at DeepMind and (among other things) a member of the team that trained AI agents to play games like Go at a superhuman level, recently gave a talk at Harvard's ML Foundations seminar. The talk was not a showcase of new research results, as many of these talks are; instead, it was an attempt to grapple with the recent and stunning successes of large language models like ChatGPT. Tim admitted that his AGI timelines have become shorter, that he is worried, and that he is increasingly prioritizing studying AI safety. I found this admission by a mainstream AI researcher at the forefront of progress striking, and was also struck by what felt like tacit agreement (or at least, not tacit condemnation of the worries as totally unreasonable) from the room—a room with a large number of impressive academic AI researchers.

Tim is not the only one sounding the alarm, of course. There is the well-publicized request for 'pausing' the training of large models, and the eminent Geoff Hinton has publicly turned to doomerism. But the fact that AGI and AI risk were normal topics at a regularly scheduled Harvard seminar, rather than in letters or op-eds, speaks to a sea change.

Part of this change in sentiment is because 2022 was a banner year for spectacular and public-facing AI progress, between the release of ChatGPT and the release of powerful diffusion generative models like DALL·E 2 and Stable Diffusion. Given that GPT-4 is powerful enough to pass many of the tests previously thought to be challenging for AI (the SAT, the GRE, AP exams, law exams, medical exams, and even a quantum computing exam), researchers have begun to ask and debate other questions in earnest. Do large language models really have a world model, or are they just stochastic parrots? Could large language models be conscious? Moreover, these questions are not being contemplated on the fringe; philosopher David Chalmers talked about the consciousness question during a keynote talk at NeurIPS, one of the largest and most prestigious AI conferences.

The problem of AI safety and the potential consequences of AGI are no longer niche topics discussed on sites like LessWrong, but immediate and visceral issues. From academia to industry, there is increasing recognition that these problems are problems, and that they should be taken seriously. "Overpopulation on Mars" may h...

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