If your goal is to get to your house, there is only one thing that will satisfy the goal: being at your house. There is a limited set of optimal solutions that will get you there. If your goal is to move as far away from your house as possible, there are infinite ways to satisfy the goal and many more solutions at your disposal.
Natural selection is a "move away" strategy, it only seeks to avoid death, not go towards anything in particular, making the possible class of problems it can solve much more open ended. Gradient Descent is a "move towards" strategy...
Gradient descent by default would just like do, not quite the same thing, it's going to do a weirder thing, because natural selection has a much narrower information bottleneck. In one sense, you could say that natural selection was at an advantage, because it finds simpler solutions.
This is silly because it's actually the exact opposite. Gradient descent is incredibly narrow. Natural selection is the polar opposite of that kind of optimisation: an organism or even computer can come up with a complex solution to any and every problem given enough time to e...
If AI behaves identically to me but our internals are different, does that mean I can learn everything about myself from studying it? If so, the input->output pipeline is the only thing that matters, and we can disregard internal mechanisms. Black boxes are all you need to learn everything about the universe, and observing how the output changes for every input is enough to replicate the functions and behaviours of any object in the world. Does this sound correct? If not, then clearly it is important to point out that the algorithm is doing Y and not X.
AIs that are superhuman at just about any task we can (or simply bother to) define a benchmark, for
This is just a false claim. Seriously, where is the evidence for this? We have AIs that are superhuman at any task we can define a benchmark for? That's not even true in the digital world let alone in the world of mechatronic AIs. Once again i will be saving this post and coming back to it in 5 years to point out that we are not all dead. This is getting ridiculous at this point.
If the Author believes what they've written then they clearly think that it would be more dangerous to ignore this than to be wrong about it, so I can't really argue that they shouldn't be person number 1. It's a comfortable moral position you can force yourself into though. "If I'm wrong, at least we avoided total annihilation, so in a way I still feel good about myself".
I see this particular kind of prediction as a kind of ethical posturing and can't in good conscience let people make them without some kind of accountability. People have been paid ...
I have saved this post on the internet archive[1].
If in 5-15 years, the prediction does not come true, i would like it to be saved as evidence of one of the many serious claims that world-ending AI will be with us in very short timelines. I think the author has given more than enough detail on what they mean by AGI, and has given more than enough detail on what it might look like, so it should be obvious whether or not the prediction comes true. In other words, no rationalising past this or taking it back. If this is what the author truly believes, t...
There are three kinds of people. Those who in the past made predictions which turned out to be false, those who didn't make predictions, and those who in the past made predictions which turned out to be true. Obviously the third kind is the best & should be trusted the most. But what about the first and second kinds?
I get the impression from your comment that you think the second kind is better than the first kind; that the first kind should be avoided and the second kind taken seriously (provided they are making plausible arguments etc.) If so, I disa...
A question for all: If you are wrong and in 4/13/40 years most of this fails to come true, will you blame it on your own models being wrong or shift goalposts towards the success of the AI safety movement / government crack downs on AI development? If the latter, how will you be able to prove that AGI definitely would have come had the government and industry not slowed down development?
To add more substance to this comment: I felt Ege came out looking the most salient here. In general, making predictions about the future should be backed by heavy un... (read more)
Thank you for raising this explicitly. I think probably lots of people's timelines are based partially on vibes-to-do-with-what-positions-sound-humble/cautious, and this isn't totally unreasonable so deserves serious explicit consideration.
I think it'll be pretty obvious whether my models were wrong or whether the government cracked down. E.g. how much compute is spent on the largest training run in 2030? If it's only on the same OOM as it is today, then it must have been government crackdown. If instead it's several OOMs more, and moreover the train... (read more)