My question is, now that we have winners, how do we make the best use of this opportunity? What further actions would help people think better about such questions, either those at OP or otherwise?
This is complicated by the caveats. We don’t know which of the points made are the ones the judges found to be interesting or useful, or which ones merely crystalized disagreements, and which ones were mostly rejected.
As is, my expectation is that the authors (of both the winners and other entries) put a lot of effort into this, and the judges a lot of effort into evaluations, and almost no one will know what to do with all of that and the opportunity will by default be wasted.
So if there’s opportunity here, what is it? For me, or for others?
As another commentor notes, at the time I offered a rebuttal to the interest rates post, that I would still stand by almost verbatim, and I’m confused why this post was still judged so highly—or what we should be paying attention to there, beyond the one line ‘the market’s interest rates do not reflect the possibility of transformative AI.’
I will refrain from commenting on the others since I haven’t given them a proper reading yet (or if I did, I don’t remember it).
As a potential experiment/aid here, I created Manifold markets (1,2,3,4,5,6) on whether my review of these six would be retrospectively considered by me a good use of time.
I was also surprised by how highly the EMH post was received, for a completely different reason – the fact that markets aren’t expecting AGI in the next few decades seems unbelievably obvious, even before we look at interest rates. If markets were expecting AGI, AI stocks would presumably be (much more, at least compared to non-AI stocks) to the moon than they are now, and market analysts would presumably (at least occasionally) cite the possibility of AGI as the reason why. But we weren’t seeing any of that, and we already knew from just general observation of the zeitgeist that, until a few months ago, the prospect of AGI was overwhelmingly not taken seriously outside of a few niche sub-communities and AI labs (how to address this reality has been a consistent, well-known hurdle within the AI safety community).
So I’m a little confused at what exactly judges thought was the value provided by the post – did they previously suspect that markets were taking AGI seriously, and this post significantly updated them towards thinking markets weren’t? Maybe instead judges thought that the post was valuable for some other reason unrelated to the main claim of “either reject EMH or reject AGI in the next few decades”, in which case I’d be curious to hear about what that reason is (e.g., if the post causes OP to borrow a bunch of money, that would be interesting to know).
Granted, it’s an interesting analysis, but that seems like a different question, and many of the other entries (including both those that did and didn’t win prizes) strike me as having advanced the discourse more, at least if we’re focusing on the main claims.
I think it’s important to verify theories that seem obvious by thinking about precise predictions the theories make. The AI and EMH post attempts to analyze precise predictions made by the theory that “the market doesn’t expect TAI soon”, and for that reason I think the post makes a valuable contribution.
That said, it is still unclear to me whether interest rates will actually rise as investors realize the potential for TAI. If news of TAI causes investors to become more optimistic about investment, potentially because of the promise of higher lifespans, or the fear of missing out on extreme relative wealth etc., that could easily cause a shift in the supply curve for loanable funds to the right, lowering the interest rate. This makes one of the central predictions in the post unreliable IMO, and that undermines the post’s thesis.
So, overall I agree with you that the market is not currently pricing in TAI, and like you I believe that for ordinary informal reasons, such as the fact that investors rarely talk about explosive growth in public. The post itself, however, while interesting, didn’t move my credences as much as the informal evidence.
I found your argument more interesting than the other “rebuttals.” Halperin et.al’s core argument is that there’s a disjunction between EMH on AI and soonish TAI, and suggests this as evidence against soonish TAI.
The other rebuttals gave evidence for one fork in this disjunction (that EMH does not apply to AI), but your argument, if correct, suggests that the disjunction might not be there in the first place.
Zvi—FWIW, your refutation of the winning essay on AI, interest rates, and the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) seemed very compelling, and I’m surprised that essay was taken seriously by the judges.
Global capital markets don’t even seem to have any idea how to value crypto protocols that might be moderately disruptive to fiat currencies and traditional finance institutions. Some traders think about these assets (or securities, or commodities, or whatever the SEC thinks they are, this week), but most don’t pay any attention to them. And even if most traders thought hard about crypto, there’s so much regulatory uncertainty about how they’ll end up being handled that it’s not even clear how traders could ‘price in’ issues such as how soon Gary Gensler will be replaced at the SEC.
Artificial Superintelligence seems vastly more disruptive than crypto, and much less salient (at least until this year) to most asset managers, bankers, traders, regulators, etc.
Yeah, I think the interest rates post is all but entirely refuted immediately by the obvious argument (the one in your rebuttal) and it both confuses me and slightly irritates me to see it regarded so highly.
If anything I think a rebuttal should win the contest, because it would present what I guess is a nontrivial observation about how information-free the yield curve is in this context, and so serves as a correction to people who frankly aren’t trading-literate who would spend energy trying to infer things about TAI timelines from securities prices
“Refuted” feels overly strong to me. The essay says that market participants don’t think TAGI is coming, and those market participants have strong financial incentive to be correct, which feels unambiguously correct to me. So either TAGI isn’t coming soon, or else a lot of people with a lot of money on the line are wrong. They might well be wrong, but their stance is certainly some form of evidence, and evidence in the direction of no TAGI. Certainly the evidence isn’t bulletproof, condsidering the recent mispricings of NVIDIA and other semi stocks.
In my own essay, I elaborated on the same point using prices set by more-informed insiders: e.g., valuations and hiring by Anthropic/DeepMind/etc., which also seem to imply that TAGI isn’t coming soon. If they have a 10% chance of capturing 10% of the value for 10 years of doubling the world economy, that’s like $10T. And yet investment expenditures and hiring and valuations are nowhere near that scale. The fact that Google has more people working on ads than TAGI implies that they think TAGI is far off. (Or, more accurately, that marginal investments would not accelerate TAGI timelines or market share.)
It did not occur to me to enter the rebuttal into the contest, I doubt anyone else entered one either. In hindsight, given the original entry won, I regret not doing so.
Congratulations to the winners.
My question is, now that we have winners, how do we make the best use of this opportunity? What further actions would help people think better about such questions, either those at OP or otherwise?
This is complicated by the caveats. We don’t know which of the points made are the ones the judges found to be interesting or useful, or which ones merely crystalized disagreements, and which ones were mostly rejected.
As is, my expectation is that the authors (of both the winners and other entries) put a lot of effort into this, and the judges a lot of effort into evaluations, and almost no one will know what to do with all of that and the opportunity will by default be wasted.
So if there’s opportunity here, what is it? For me, or for others?
As another commentor notes, at the time I offered a rebuttal to the interest rates post, that I would still stand by almost verbatim, and I’m confused why this post was still judged so highly—or what we should be paying attention to there, beyond the one line ‘the market’s interest rates do not reflect the possibility of transformative AI.’
I will refrain from commenting on the others since I haven’t given them a proper reading yet (or if I did, I don’t remember it).
As a potential experiment/aid here, I created Manifold markets (1,2,3,4,5,6) on whether my review of these six would be retrospectively considered by me a good use of time.
I was also surprised by how highly the EMH post was received, for a completely different reason – the fact that markets aren’t expecting AGI in the next few decades seems unbelievably obvious, even before we look at interest rates. If markets were expecting AGI, AI stocks would presumably be (much more, at least compared to non-AI stocks) to the moon than they are now, and market analysts would presumably (at least occasionally) cite the possibility of AGI as the reason why. But we weren’t seeing any of that, and we already knew from just general observation of the zeitgeist that, until a few months ago, the prospect of AGI was overwhelmingly not taken seriously outside of a few niche sub-communities and AI labs (how to address this reality has been a consistent, well-known hurdle within the AI safety community).
So I’m a little confused at what exactly judges thought was the value provided by the post – did they previously suspect that markets were taking AGI seriously, and this post significantly updated them towards thinking markets weren’t? Maybe instead judges thought that the post was valuable for some other reason unrelated to the main claim of “either reject EMH or reject AGI in the next few decades”, in which case I’d be curious to hear about what that reason is (e.g., if the post causes OP to borrow a bunch of money, that would be interesting to know).
Granted, it’s an interesting analysis, but that seems like a different question, and many of the other entries (including both those that did and didn’t win prizes) strike me as having advanced the discourse more, at least if we’re focusing on the main claims.
I think it’s important to verify theories that seem obvious by thinking about precise predictions the theories make. The AI and EMH post attempts to analyze precise predictions made by the theory that “the market doesn’t expect TAI soon”, and for that reason I think the post makes a valuable contribution.
That said, it is still unclear to me whether interest rates will actually rise as investors realize the potential for TAI. If news of TAI causes investors to become more optimistic about investment, potentially because of the promise of higher lifespans, or the fear of missing out on extreme relative wealth etc., that could easily cause a shift in the supply curve for loanable funds to the right, lowering the interest rate. This makes one of the central predictions in the post unreliable IMO, and that undermines the post’s thesis.
So, overall I agree with you that the market is not currently pricing in TAI, and like you I believe that for ordinary informal reasons, such as the fact that investors rarely talk about explosive growth in public. The post itself, however, while interesting, didn’t move my credences as much as the informal evidence.
I found your argument more interesting than the other “rebuttals.” Halperin et.al’s core argument is that there’s a disjunction between EMH on AI and soonish TAI, and suggests this as evidence against soonish TAI.
The other rebuttals gave evidence for one fork in this disjunction (that EMH does not apply to AI), but your argument, if correct, suggests that the disjunction might not be there in the first place.
Zvi—FWIW, your refutation of the winning essay on AI, interest rates, and the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) seemed very compelling, and I’m surprised that essay was taken seriously by the judges.
Global capital markets don’t even seem to have any idea how to value crypto protocols that might be moderately disruptive to fiat currencies and traditional finance institutions. Some traders think about these assets (or securities, or commodities, or whatever the SEC thinks they are, this week), but most don’t pay any attention to them. And even if most traders thought hard about crypto, there’s so much regulatory uncertainty about how they’ll end up being handled that it’s not even clear how traders could ‘price in’ issues such as how soon Gary Gensler will be replaced at the SEC.
Artificial Superintelligence seems vastly more disruptive than crypto, and much less salient (at least until this year) to most asset managers, bankers, traders, regulators, etc.
Yeah, I think the interest rates post is all but entirely refuted immediately by the obvious argument (the one in your rebuttal) and it both confuses me and slightly irritates me to see it regarded so highly.
If anything I think a rebuttal should win the contest, because it would present what I guess is a nontrivial observation about how information-free the yield curve is in this context, and so serves as a correction to people who frankly aren’t trading-literate who would spend energy trying to infer things about TAI timelines from securities prices
“Refuted” feels overly strong to me. The essay says that market participants don’t think TAGI is coming, and those market participants have strong financial incentive to be correct, which feels unambiguously correct to me. So either TAGI isn’t coming soon, or else a lot of people with a lot of money on the line are wrong. They might well be wrong, but their stance is certainly some form of evidence, and evidence in the direction of no TAGI. Certainly the evidence isn’t bulletproof, condsidering the recent mispricings of NVIDIA and other semi stocks.
In my own essay, I elaborated on the same point using prices set by more-informed insiders: e.g., valuations and hiring by Anthropic/DeepMind/etc., which also seem to imply that TAGI isn’t coming soon. If they have a 10% chance of capturing 10% of the value for 10 years of doubling the world economy, that’s like $10T. And yet investment expenditures and hiring and valuations are nowhere near that scale. The fact that Google has more people working on ads than TAGI implies that they think TAGI is far off. (Or, more accurately, that marginal investments would not accelerate TAGI timelines or market share.)
It did not occur to me to enter the rebuttal into the contest, I doubt anyone else entered one either. In hindsight, given the original entry won, I regret not doing so.