AI systems may soon fully automate AI R&D. Myself and Daniel Eth have argued that this could precipitate a software intelligence explosion – a period of rapid AI progress due to AI improving AI algorithms and data.
But we never addressed a crucial question: how big would a software intelligence explosion be?
This new paper fills that gap.
Overall, we guess that the software intelligence explosion will probably (~60%) compress >3 years of AI progress into <1 year, but is somewhat unlikely (~20%) to compress >10 years into <1 year. That’s >3 years of total AI progress at recent rates (from both compute and software), achieved solely through software improvements. If compute is still increasing during this time, as seems likely, that... (read 10119 more words →)