It just looks a lot like motivated reasoning to me - kind of like they started with the conclusion and worked backward. Those examples are pretty unreasonable as conditional probabilities. Do they explain why "algorithms for transformative AGI" are very unlikely to meaningfully speed up software and hardware R&D?

Saying they are conditional does not mean they are. For example, why is P(We invent a way for AGIs to learn faster than humans|We invent algorithms for transformative AGI) only 40%? Or P(AGI inference costs drop below $25/hr (per human equivalent)^[1]|We invent algorithms for transformative AGI) only 16%!? These would be much more reasonable as unconditional probabilities. At the very least, "algorithms for transformative AGI" would be used to massively increase software and hardware R&D, even if expensive at first, such that inference costs would quickly drop.

1. ^{^}

   As an aside, surely this milestone has basically now already been reached? At least for the 90% percentile human in most intellectual tasks.

If they were already aware, they certainly didn't do anything to address it, given their conclusion is basically a result of falling for it.

It's more than just intuitions, it's grounded in current research and recent progress in (proto) AGI. To validate the opposing intuitions (long timelines) requires more in the way of leaps of faith (to say that things will suddenly stop working as they have been). Longer timelines intuitions have also been proven wrong consistently over the last few years (e.g. AI constantly doing things people predicted were "decades away" just a few years, or even months, before).

I found this paper which attempts a similar sort of exercise as the AI 2027 report and gets a very different result.

This is an example of the multiple stages fallacy (as pointed out here), where you can get arbitrarily low probabilities for anything by dividing it up enough and assuming things are uncorrelated.

For what it's worth, I think you are woefully miscalibrated about what the right course of action is if you care about the people you love. Preventing ASI from being built for at least a few years should be a far bigger priority (and Mechanize's goal is ~the opposite of that). Would be interested to hear more re why you think violent AI takeover is unlikely.

As previously referred to, I can't get bank loans (no stable income).

Where I say "some of which I borrow against now (with 100% interest over 5 years)", I'm referring to the bet.

if you think the world is almost certainly doomed

I think it's maybe 60% doomed.

it seems crazy not to just spend it and figure out the reputational details on the slim chance we survive.

Even if I thought it was 90%+ doomed, it's this kind of attitude that has got us into this whole mess in the first place! People burning the commons for short term gain is directly leading to massive amounts of x-risk.

you couldn’t ask for someone better than Yann LeCun, no?

Really? I've never seen any substantive argument from LeCun. He mostly just presents very weak arguments (and ad hominem) on social media, that are falsified within months (e.g. his claims about LLMs not being able to world model). Please link to the best written one you know of.

Ilya's company website says "Superintelligence is within reach." I think it's reasonable to interpret that as having a short timeline. If not an even stronger claim that he thinks he knows how to actually build it.

The post gives a specific example of this: the “software intelligence explosion” concept.

Right, and doesn't address any of the meat in the methodology section.