All of Bogdan Ionut Cirstea's Comments + Replies

From the linked post: 

As a result of our internal process, we decided to keep that new higher bar, while also aiming to roughly double our GCR spending over the next few years — if we can find sufficiently cost-effective opportunities. 

At first glance, this seems potentially 'wildly conservative' to me, if I think of what this implies for the AI risk mitigation portion of the funding and how this intersects with (shortening) timelines [estimates]. 

My impression from looking briefly at recent grants is that probably <= 150M$ was spent by O... (read more)

I'll also note that the role of the Constitution in Constitutional AI (https://www.anthropic.com/index/claudes-constitution) seems quite related to your 3rd paragraph.

Maybe, though e.g. combined with

it would still result in a high likelihood of very short timelines to superintelligence (there can be inconsistencies between Metaculus forecasts, e.g. with 

as others have pointed out before). I'm not claiming we should only rely on these Metaculus forecasts or that we should only plan for [very] short timelines, but I'm getting the impression the community as a whole and OpenPhil in particular haven't really updated their spending plans with respect to these considerations (or at... (read more)

Can you comment a bit more on how the specific number of years (20 and 50) were chosen? Aren't those intervals [very] conservative, especially given that AGI/TAI timeline estimates have shortened for many? E.g., if one took seriously the predictions from 

wouldn't it be reasonable to also have scenarios under which you might want to spend at least the AI risk portfolio in something like 5-10 years instead? Maybe this is covered somewhat by 'Of course, we can adjust our spending rate over time', but I'd still be curious to hear more ... (read more)

Thanks, this series of summaries is great! Minor correction: DeepMind released Sparrow (not OpenAI).

'One metaphor for my headspace is that it feels as though the world is a set of people on a plane blasting down the runway:

And every time I read commentary on what's going on in the world, people are discussing how to arrange your seatbelt as comfortably as possible given that wearing one is part of life, or saying how the best moments in life are sitting with your family and watching the white lines whooshing by, or arguing about whose fault it is that there's a background roar making it hard to hear each other.

I don't know where we're actually heading, o... (read more)

'If you know the aliens are landing in thirty years, it’s still a big deal now.' (Stuart Russell)

'Before the prospect of an intelligence explosion, we humans are like small children playing with a bomb. Such is the mismatch between the power of our plaything and the immaturity of our conduct. Superintelligence is a challenge for which we are not ready now and will not be ready for a long time. We have little idea when the detonation will occur, though if we hold the device to our ear we can hear a faint ticking sound. For a child with an undetonated bomb in its hands, a sensible thing to do would be to put it down gently, quickly back out of the room,... (read more)

'Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.' (I. J. Good)

'The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.' (Eliezer Yudkowsky)

'You can't fetch the coffee if you're dead' (Stuart Russell)

If I remember correctly (from 'The Precipice') 'Unaligned AI ~1 in 50 1.7' should actually be 'Unaligned AI ~1 in 10 1'.

From  https://www.cold-takes.com/supplement-to-why-ai-alignment-could-be-hard/ : 'A model about as powerful as a human brain seems like it would be ~100-10,000 times larger than the largest neural networks trained today, and I think could be trained using an amount of data and computation that -- while probably prohibitive as of August 2021 -- would come within reach after 15-30 years of hardware and algorithmic improvements.' Is it safe to assume that this is an updated, shorter timeline compared to https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/KrJfoZzpSDpnrv... (read more)

'CSET-Foretell forecasts were quoted by Quanta Magazine (a) on on whether VC funding for tech startups will dry up' - the linked article seems to come from Quartz, not Quanta Magazine

I was very surprised by the paragraph: 'However, I also have an intuitive preference (which is related to the "burden of proof" analyses given previously) to err on the conservative side when making estimates like this. Overall, my best guesses about transformative AI timelines are similar to those of Bio Anchors.' especially in context and especially because of the use of the term 'conservative'. I would have thought that the conservative assumption to make would be shorter timelines (since less time to prepare). If I remember correctly, Toby Ord discusse... (read more)