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 ...
Can the people who agreement-downvoted this explain yourselves? Bogdan has a good point: if we really believe in short timelines to transformative AI we should either be spending our entire AI-philanthropy capital endowment now, or possibly investing it in something that will be useful after TAI exists. What does not make sense is trying to set up a slow funding stream for 50 years of AI alignment research if we'll have AGI in 20 years.
(Edit: the comment above had very negative net agreement when I wrote this.)
'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...
'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,...
'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)
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...
Encouraging them to apply to the next round of the AGI Safety Fundamentals program https://www.eacambridge.org/agi-safety-fundamentals might be another idea. The curriculum there can also provide inspiration for reading group materials.
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...
I think aligning narrow superhuman models could be one very valuable megaproject and this seems scalable to >= $100 million, especially if also training large models (not just fine-tuning them for safety). Training their own large models for alignment research seems to be what Anthropic plans to do. This is also touched upon in Chris Olah's recent 80k interview.
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)