I’m so excited to see this go live! I’ve learned a lot from it & consider it to do for takeoff speeds what Ajeya’s report did for timelines, i.e. it’s an actual fucking serious-ass gears-level model, the best that exists in the world for now. Future work will critique it and build off it rather than start from scratch, I say. Thanks Tom and Epoch and everyone else who contributed!
I strongly encourage everyone reading this to spend 10min playing around with the model, trying out different settings, etc. For example: Try to get it to match what you intuitively felt like timelines and takeoff would look like, and see how hard it is to get it to do so. Or: Go through the top 5-10 variables one by one and change them to what you think they should be (leaving unchanged the ones about which you have no opinion) and then see what effect each change has.
Almost two years ago I wrote this story of what the next five years would look like on my median timeline. At the time I had the bio anchors framework in mind with a median training requirements of 3e29. So, you can use this takeoff model as a nice complement to that story:
Set AGI training requirements to 3e29 instead of 1e36
(Optional) Set software returns to 2.5 instead of 1.25 (I endorse this change in general, because it’s more consistent with the empirical evidence. See Tom’s report for details & decide whether his justification for cutting it in half, to 1.25, is convincing.)
(Optional) Set FLOP gap to 1e2 instead of 1e4 (In general, as Tom discusses in the report, if training requirements are smaller then probably the FLOP gap is smaller too. So if we are starting with Tom’s best guess scenario and lowering the training requirements we should also lower the FLOP gap.)
The result:
In 2024, 4% of AI R&D tasks are automated; then 32% in 2026, and then singularity happens around when I expected, in mid 2028. This is close enough to what I had expected when I wrote the story that I’m tentatively making it canon.
Oh, also, a citation about my contribution to this post (Tom was going to make this a footnote but ran into technical difficulties): The extremely janky graph/diagram was made by me in may 2021, to help explain Ajeya’s Bio Anchors model. The graph that forms the bottom left corner came from some ARK Invest webpage which I can’t find now.
Very worrying! Can you get OpenAI to do something!? What’s the plan? Is a global moratorium on AGI research possible? Should we just be trying for it anyway at this point? Are Google/DeepMind and Microsoft/OpenAI even discussing this with each other?
In 2024, 4% of AI R&D tasks are automated; then 32% in 2026, and then singularity happens around when I expected, in mid 2028. This is close enough to what I had expected when I wrote the story that I’m tentatively making it canon.
Relatedly, what it your median time from now until human extinction? If it is only a few years, I would be happy to set up a bet like this one.
I’m so excited to see this go live! I’ve learned a lot from it & consider it to do for takeoff speeds what Ajeya’s report did for timelines, i.e. it’s an actual fucking serious-ass gears-level model, the best that exists in the world for now. Future work will critique it and build off it rather than start from scratch, I say. Thanks Tom and Epoch and everyone else who contributed!
I strongly encourage everyone reading this to spend 10min playing around with the model, trying out different settings, etc. For example: Try to get it to match what you intuitively felt like timelines and takeoff would look like, and see how hard it is to get it to do so. Or: Go through the top 5-10 variables one by one and change them to what you think they should be (leaving unchanged the ones about which you have no opinion) and then see what effect each change has.
Almost two years ago I wrote this story of what the next five years would look like on my median timeline. At the time I had the bio anchors framework in mind with a median training requirements of 3e29. So, you can use this takeoff model as a nice complement to that story:
Go to takeoffspeeds.com and load the preset: best guess scenario.
Set AGI training requirements to 3e29 instead of 1e36
(Optional) Set software returns to 2.5 instead of 1.25 (I endorse this change in general, because it’s more consistent with the empirical evidence. See Tom’s report for details & decide whether his justification for cutting it in half, to 1.25, is convincing.)
(Optional) Set FLOP gap to 1e2 instead of 1e4 (In general, as Tom discusses in the report, if training requirements are smaller then probably the FLOP gap is smaller too. So if we are starting with Tom’s best guess scenario and lowering the training requirements we should also lower the FLOP gap.)
The result:
In 2024, 4% of AI R&D tasks are automated; then 32% in 2026, and then singularity happens around when I expected, in mid 2028. This is close enough to what I had expected when I wrote the story that I’m tentatively making it canon.
Oh, also, a citation about my contribution to this post (Tom was going to make this a footnote but ran into technical difficulties): The extremely janky graph/diagram was made by me in may 2021, to help explain Ajeya’s Bio Anchors model. The graph that forms the bottom left corner came from some ARK Invest webpage which I can’t find now.
Very worrying! Can you get OpenAI to do something!? What’s the plan? Is a global moratorium on AGI research possible? Should we just be trying for it anyway at this point? Are Google/DeepMind and Microsoft/OpenAI even discussing this with each other?
Hi Daniel,
Relatedly, what it your median time from now until human extinction? If it is only a few years, I would be happy to set up a bet like this one.