Thanks—I only read this linkpost and Haydn’s comment quoting your summary, not the linked post as a whole, but this seems to me like probably useful work.
One nitpick:
It seems likely to me that the US is currently much more likely to create transformative AI before China, especially under short(ish) timelines (next 5-15 years) − 70%.
I feel like it’d be more useful/clearer to say “It seems x% likely that the US will create transformative AI before China, and y% likely if TAI is developed in short(ish) timelines (next 5-15 years)”. Because:
At the moment, you’re saying it’s 70% likely that the US will be “much more likely”, i.e. giving a likelihood of a qualitatively stated (hence kind-of vague) likelihood.
And that claim itself seems to be kind-of but not exactly conditioned on short timelines worlds. Or maybe instead it’s a 70% chance of the conjunction of “the US is much more likely (not conditioning on timelines)” and “this is especially so if there are short timelines”. It’s not really clear which one.
And if it’s the conjunction, that seems less useful than knowing what odds you assign to each of the two claims separately.
Yeah, fair point. When I wrote this, I roughly followed this process:
Write article
Summarize overall takes in bullet points
Add some probabilities to show roughly how certain I am of those bullet points, where this process was something like “okay I’ll re-read this and see how confident I am that each bullet is true”
I think it would’ve been more informative if I wrote the bullet points with an explicit aim to add probabilities to them, rather than writing them and thinking after “ah yeah, I should more clearly express my certainty with these”.
Thanks—I only read this linkpost and Haydn’s comment quoting your summary, not the linked post as a whole, but this seems to me like probably useful work.
One nitpick:
I feel like it’d be more useful/clearer to say “It seems x% likely that the US will create transformative AI before China, and y% likely if TAI is developed in short(ish) timelines (next 5-15 years)”. Because:
At the moment, you’re saying it’s 70% likely that the US will be “much more likely”, i.e. giving a likelihood of a qualitatively stated (hence kind-of vague) likelihood.
And that claim itself seems to be kind-of but not exactly conditioned on short timelines worlds. Or maybe instead it’s a 70% chance of the conjunction of “the US is much more likely (not conditioning on timelines)” and “this is especially so if there are short timelines”. It’s not really clear which one.
And if it’s the conjunction, that seems less useful than knowing what odds you assign to each of the two claims separately.
Yeah, fair point. When I wrote this, I roughly followed this process:
Write article
Summarize overall takes in bullet points
Add some probabilities to show roughly how certain I am of those bullet points, where this process was something like “okay I’ll re-read this and see how confident I am that each bullet is true”
I think it would’ve been more informative if I wrote the bullet points with an explicit aim to add probabilities to them, rather than writing them and thinking after “ah yeah, I should more clearly express my certainty with these”.