Oh, and to answer your question for why it’s more likely shorter than later: Progress right now seems to be driven by compute, and in particular by buying greater and greater quantities of it. In a few years this trend MUST stop, because not even the US government would have enough money to continue the trend of spending an order of magnitude+ more each year. So if we haven’t got to crazy AI by 2026 or so, the current paradigm of “just add more compute” will no longer be so viable, and we’re back to waiting for new ideas to come along.
Gwern’s comment was really helpful to see the different paradigms, thanks for sharing! This reasoning makes sense to me in terms of increasing compute—I could see this pushing me slightly more towards shorter timelines, although I’d want to spend a lot longer researching this.
Oh, and to answer your question for why it’s more likely shorter than later: Progress right now seems to be driven by compute, and in particular by buying greater and greater quantities of it. In a few years this trend MUST stop, because not even the US government would have enough money to continue the trend of spending an order of magnitude+ more each year. So if we haven’t got to crazy AI by 2026 or so, the current paradigm of “just add more compute” will no longer be so viable, and we’re back to waiting for new ideas to come along.
Gwern’s comment was really helpful to see the different paradigms, thanks for sharing! This reasoning makes sense to me in terms of increasing compute—I could see this pushing me slightly more towards shorter timelines, although I’d want to spend a lot longer researching this.