In my memory, the main impetus was a couple of leading AI safety ML researchers started making the case for 5-year timelines. They were broadly qualitatively correct and remarkably insightful (promoting the scaling-first worldview), but obviously quantitatively too aggressive. And AlphaGo and AlphaZero had freaked people out, too.
A lot of other people at the time (including close advisers to OP folks) had 10-20yr timelines. My subjective impression was that people in the OP orbit generally had more aggressive timelines than Ajeya’s report did.
What’s the Great AI Timelines Scare of 2017?
In my memory, the main impetus was a couple of leading AI safety ML researchers started making the case for 5-year timelines. They were broadly qualitatively correct and remarkably insightful (promoting the scaling-first worldview), but obviously quantitatively too aggressive. And AlphaGo and AlphaZero had freaked people out, too.
A lot of other people at the time (including close advisers to OP folks) had 10-20yr timelines. My subjective impression was that people in the OP orbit generally had more aggressive timelines than Ajeya’s report did.