All of janus's Comments + Replies

Thanks. Did you arrive at this independently, or are you mirroring nostalgebraist's recommendation? I'm guessing independently, but wanted to confirm.

  I haven't engaged much with people outside the EA and AI alignment communities, and I'd guess that very few people outside these communities have heard about the report. I don't personally feel sold that the risks of publishing this type of analysis more broadly (in terms of potentially increasing capabilities work) outweigh the benefits of helping people better understand what to expect with AI and giving us a better chance of figuring out if our views are wrong. However, some other people in the AI risk reduction community who we consulted (TBC, not my manager or Open Phil as an institution) were more concerned about this, and I respect their judgment, so I chose to publish the draft report on LessWrong and avoid doing things that could result in it being shared much more widely, especially in a "low-bandwidth" way (e.g. just the "headline graph" being shared on social media).

Thanks!  I'll answer your cluster of questions about takeoff speeds and commercialization in this comment and leave another comment respond to your questions about sharing my report outside the EA community. Broadly speaking, I do expect that  transformative AI will be foreshadowed by incremental economic gains; I generally expect gradual takeoff , meaning I would bet that at some point growth will be ~10% per year before it hits 30% per year (which was the arbitrary cut-off for "transformative" used in my report). I don't think it's necessarily the case; I just think it'll probably work this way. On the outside view, that's how most technologies seem to have worked. And on the inside view, it seems like there are lots of valuable-but-not-transformative applications of existing models on the horizon, and industry giants + startups are already on the move trying to capitalize. My views imply a roughly ~10% probability that the compute to train transformative AI would be affordable in 10 years or less, which wouldn't really leave time for this kind of gradual takeoff. One reason it's a pretty low number is because it would imply sudden takeoff and I'm skeptical of that implication (though it's not the only reason -- I think there are separate reasons to be skeptical of the Lifetime Anchor and the Short Horizon Neural Network anchor, which drive short timelines in my model). I don't expect that several generations of more powerful successors to GPT-3 will be developed before we see significant commercial applications to GPT-3; I expect commercialization of existing models and scaleup to larger models to be happening in parallel. There are already various applications online, e.g. AI Dungeon (based on GPT-3), TabNine (based on GPT-2), and this list of other apps. I don't think that evidence OpenAI was productizing GPT-3 would shift my timelines much either way, since I already expect them to be investing pretty heavily in this.  Relative to the present, I expect the