I agree with the spirit of claim. Timeline information is probably not used for much.
One thing I disagree with:
Regardless of timelines, there are many things we need to be making progress on as quickly as possible. These include...[snip]...getting competent, well-intentioned people into companies and governments to work on these things; getting serious AI regulation started in earnest...”
But convincing smart people to work on alignment is also convincing those smart people to not work on something else, and there are large opportunity costs. It doesn’t seem true that it’s regardless of timelines, unless you assume the variability in plausible timelines is on the short side.
Also, the regulations that are actually value-adding seems at least somewhat timeline dependent.
Still, I think this essay makes an important point—there’s a lot of babble about timelines, which is extremely unlikely to have alpha on those predictions. And there’s a large opportunity cost to spending time talking about it. Smart people’s time are extremely valuable, but even ignoring that, life is short.
The best timeline estimates are far more likely to come from institutions that specialize into forecasting, who can take advantage of the most modern, best methods. Other people who aren’t using those methods can still talk about the topic if they want to, but it’s very unlikely they’ll come up with timelines that are better.
I agree with the spirit of claim. Timeline information is probably not used for much.
One thing I disagree with:
But convincing smart people to work on alignment is also convincing those smart people to not work on something else, and there are large opportunity costs. It doesn’t seem true that it’s regardless of timelines, unless you assume the variability in plausible timelines is on the short side.
Also, the regulations that are actually value-adding seems at least somewhat timeline dependent.
Still, I think this essay makes an important point—there’s a lot of babble about timelines, which is extremely unlikely to have alpha on those predictions. And there’s a large opportunity cost to spending time talking about it. Smart people’s time are extremely valuable, but even ignoring that, life is short.
The best timeline estimates are far more likely to come from institutions that specialize into forecasting, who can take advantage of the most modern, best methods. Other people who aren’t using those methods can still talk about the topic if they want to, but it’s very unlikely they’ll come up with timelines that are better.