I don’t see this strain of argument as particularly action relevant. I feel like you are getting way to caught up in the abstractions of what “agi” is and such. This is obviously a big deal, this is obviously going to happen “soon” and/or already “happening”, it’s obviously time to take this very serious and act like responsible adults.
Ok so you think “AGI” is likely 5+ years away. Are you not worried about anthropic having a fiduciary responsibility to it’s shareholders to maximize profits? I guess reading between the lines you see very little value in slowing down or regulating AI? While leaving room for the chance that our whole disagreement does revolve around our object level timeline differences, I think you probably are missing the forrest from the trees here in your quest to prove the incorrectness of people with shorter timelines.
I am not a doom maximilist in the sense that I think this technology is already profoundly world-bending and scary today. I am worried about my cousin becoming a short form addicted goonbot with an AI best friend right now—whether or not robot bees are about to gorge my eyes out.
I think there are a reasonably long list of sensible regulations around this stuff (both x-risk related and more minor stuff) that would probably result in a large drawdown in these companies valuations and really the stock market at large. For example but not limited to—AI companionship, romance, porn should probably be on a pause right now while the government performs large scale AB testing, the same thing we should have done with social media and cellphone use especially in children that our government horribly failed to do because of its inability to utilitize RCTs and the absolute horrifying average age of our president and both houses of congress.
I was specifically responding to your assertion that no one should be able to confidently say X. There are world-class experts like Ilya Sutskever and Demis Hassabis who do confidently say X, and they’re even on the bullish, optimistic end of the spectrum in terms of AI capabilities forecasts/AGI forecasts, such that they’re some of the public figures in AI that people cite when they want to make an argument for near-term AGI. I was only directly responding to that narrow point.
It doesn’t really have anything to do with different specific definitions of AGI. I’m not sure if Sutskever and Hassabis even define AGI the same way, for example. It’s just what both of them have said about what it will take to get to AGI, which is what you specifically said no one should be able to confidently say X.
On your more general argument that it’s obvious AGI or something enough to AGI is obviously going to be developed soon, or has already been developed, well, no, I don’t agree with that general argument. To try to quickly boil down the main cruxes of my counterargument, AI isn’t that useful for anything and there are a lot of thorny research problems people have already been banging their heads against for years that we need to make progress on to make AI more useful.
But I was just trying to respond to your narrow point about no one being able to confidently say X. I wasn’t trying to open up a general debate about near-term AGI (let alone about regulating the generative AI systems that currently exist). However, if you’re eager, I would be happy to have that debate in the comments of another post (e.g. any of the ones I’ve written on the topic, such as the two I just linked to).
I don’t see this strain of argument as particularly action relevant. I feel like you are getting way to caught up in the abstractions of what “agi” is and such. This is obviously a big deal, this is obviously going to happen “soon” and/or already “happening”, it’s obviously time to take this very serious and act like responsible adults.
Ok so you think “AGI” is likely 5+ years away. Are you not worried about anthropic having a fiduciary responsibility to it’s shareholders to maximize profits? I guess reading between the lines you see very little value in slowing down or regulating AI? While leaving room for the chance that our whole disagreement does revolve around our object level timeline differences, I think you probably are missing the forrest from the trees here in your quest to prove the incorrectness of people with shorter timelines.
I am not a doom maximilist in the sense that I think this technology is already profoundly world-bending and scary today. I am worried about my cousin becoming a short form addicted goonbot with an AI best friend right now—whether or not robot bees are about to gorge my eyes out.
I think there are a reasonably long list of sensible regulations around this stuff (both x-risk related and more minor stuff) that would probably result in a large drawdown in these companies valuations and really the stock market at large. For example but not limited to—AI companionship, romance, porn should probably be on a pause right now while the government performs large scale AB testing, the same thing we should have done with social media and cellphone use especially in children that our government horribly failed to do because of its inability to utilitize RCTs and the absolute horrifying average age of our president and both houses of congress.
I was specifically responding to your assertion that no one should be able to confidently say X. There are world-class experts like Ilya Sutskever and Demis Hassabis who do confidently say X, and they’re even on the bullish, optimistic end of the spectrum in terms of AI capabilities forecasts/AGI forecasts, such that they’re some of the public figures in AI that people cite when they want to make an argument for near-term AGI. I was only directly responding to that narrow point.
It doesn’t really have anything to do with different specific definitions of AGI. I’m not sure if Sutskever and Hassabis even define AGI the same way, for example. It’s just what both of them have said about what it will take to get to AGI, which is what you specifically said no one should be able to confidently say X.
On your more general argument that it’s obvious AGI or something enough to AGI is obviously going to be developed soon, or has already been developed, well, no, I don’t agree with that general argument. To try to quickly boil down the main cruxes of my counterargument, AI isn’t that useful for anything and there are a lot of thorny research problems people have already been banging their heads against for years that we need to make progress on to make AI more useful.
But I was just trying to respond to your narrow point about no one being able to confidently say X. I wasn’t trying to open up a general debate about near-term AGI (let alone about regulating the generative AI systems that currently exist). However, if you’re eager, I would be happy to have that debate in the comments of another post (e.g. any of the ones I’ve written on the topic, such as the two I just linked to).