This seems mostly right to me and I would appreciate such an effort.

One nitpick:

The reason I think this would be good is because SWE-bench is probably the closest thing we have to a measure of how good LLMs are at software engineering and AI R&D related tasks

I expect this will improve over time and that SWE-bench won't be our best fixed benchmark in a year or two. (SWE bench is only about 6 months old at this point!)

Also, I think if we put aside fixed benchmarks, we have other reasonable measures.

I wouldn't trust an Altman quote in a book tbh. In fact, I think it's reasonable to not trust what Altman says in general. 

OpenAI has never (to my knowledge) made public statements about not using AI to automate AI research

I agree.

Another source:

OpenAI intends to use Strawberry to perform research. . . .

Among the capabilities OpenAI is aiming Strawberry at is performing long-horizon tasks (LHT), the document says, referring to complex tasks that require a model to plan ahead and perform a series of actions over an extended period of time, the first source explained.

To do so, OpenAI is creating, training and evaluating the models on what the company calls a “deep-research” dataset, according to the OpenAI internal documentation. . . .

OpenAI specifically wants its models to use these capabilities to conduct research by browsing the web autonomously with the assistance of a “CUA,” or a computer-using agent, that can take actions based on its findings, according to the document and one of the sources. OpenAI also plans to test its capabilities on doing the work of software and machine learning engineers.

I have a guess that this:

"require that self-improving software require human intervention to move forward on each iteration"

is the unspoken distinction occurring here, how constant the feedback loop is for self-improvement. 

So, people talk about recursive self-improvement, but mean two separate things, one is recursive self-improving models that require no human intervention to move forward on each iteration (perhaps there no longer is an iterative release process, the model is dynamic and constantly improving), and the other is somewhat the current step paradigm where we get a GPT-N+1 model that is 100x the effective compute of GPT-N.

So Sam says, no way do we want a constant curve of improvement, we want a step function. In both cases models contribute to AI research, in one case it contributes to the next gen, in the other case it improves itself.

A misaligned AI can't just "kill all the humans". This would be suicide, as soon after, the electricity and other infrastructure would fail and the AI would shut off.

No. it would not be. In the world without us, electrical infrastructure would last quite a while, especially with no humans and their needs or wants to address. Most obviously, RTGs and solar panels will last indefinitely with no intervention, and nuclear power plants and hydroelectric plants can run for weeks or months autonomously. (If you believe otherwise, please provide sources for why you are sure about "soon after" - in fact, so sure about your power grid claims that you think this claim alone guarantees the AI failure story must be "pretty different" - and be more specific about how soon is "soon".)

And think a little bit harder about options available to superintelligent civilizations of AIs*, instead of assuming they do the maximally dumb thing of crashing the grid and immediately dying... (I assure you any such AIs implementing that strategy will have spent a lot longer thinking about how to do it well than you have for your comment.)

Add in the capability to take over the Internet of Things and the shambolic state of embedded computers which mean that the billions of AI instances & robots/drones can run the grid to a considerable degree and also do a more controlled shutdown than the maximally self-sabotaging approach of 'simply let it all crash without lifting a finger to do anything', and the ability to stockpile energy in advance or build one's own facilities due to the economic value of AGI (how would that look much different than, say, Amazon's new multi-billion-dollar datacenter hooked up directly to a gigawatt nuclear power plant...? why would an AGI in that datacenter care about the rest of the American grid, never mind world power?), and the 'mutually assured destruction' thesis is on very shaky grounds.

And every day that passes right now, the more we succeed in various kinds of decentralization or decarbonization initiatives and the more we automate pre-AGI, the less true the thesis gets. The AGIs only need one working place to bootstrap from, and it's a big world, and there's a lot of solar panels and other stuff out there and more and more every day... (And also, of course, there are many scenarios where it is not 'kill all humans immediately', but they end in the same place.)

Would such a strategy be the AGIs' first best choice? Almost certainly not, any more than chemotherapy is your ideal option for dealing with cancer (as opposed to "don't get cancer in the first place"). But the option is definitely there.

* One thing I've started doing recently is trying to always refer to AI threats in the plural, because while there may at some point be a single instance running on a single computer, that phase will not last any longer than, say, COVID-19 lasted as a single infected cell; as we understand DL scaling (and Internet security) now, any window where effective instances of a neural net can be still counted with less than 4 digit numbers may be quite narrow. (Even an ordinary commercial deployment of a new model like GPT-5 will usually involve thousands upon thousands of simultaneous instances.) But it seems to be a very powerful intuition pump for most people that a NN must be harmless, in the way that a single human is almost powerless compared to humanity, and it may help if one simply denies that premise from the beginning and talks about 'AI civilizations' etc.

Before then, if the AI wishes to actually survive, it needs to construct and control a robot/nanomachine population advanced enough to maintain its infrastructure.

As Gwern said, you don't really need to maintain all the infrastructure for that long, and doing it for a while seems quite doable without advanced robots or nanomachines. 

If one wanted to do a very prosaic estimate, you could do something like "how fast is AI software development progress accelerating when the AI can kill all the humans" and then see how many calendar months you need to actually maintain the compute infrastructure before the AI can obviously just build some robots or nanomachines. 

My best guess is that the AI will have some robots from which it could bootstrap substantially before it can kill all the humans. But even if it didn't, it seems like with algorithmic progress rates being likely at the very highest when the AI will get smart enough to kill everyone, it seems like you would at most need a few more doublings of compute-efficiency to get that capacity, which would be only a few weeks to months away then, where I think you won't really run into compute-infrastructure issues even if everyone is dead. 

Of course, forecasting this kind of stuff is hard, but I do think "the AI needs to maintain infrastructure" tends to be pretty overstated. My guess is at any point where the AI could kill everyone, it would probably also not really have a problem of bootstrapping afterwards. 

Separately from persistence of the grid: humanoid robots are damned near ready to go now. Recent progress is startling. And if the AGI can do some of the motor control, existing robots are adequate to bootstrap manufacturing of better robots.

That's probably true if the takeover is to maximize the AI's persistence.  You could imagine a misaligned AI that doesn't care about its own persistence -- e.g., an AI that got handed a misformed min() or max() that causes it to kill all humans instrumental to its goal (e.g., min(future_human_global_warming))

I feel pretty into encrypting the weights and throwing the encryption key into the ocean or something, where you think it's very likely you'll find it in the limits of technological progress

I wrote about this, and I agree that it's very important to retain archival copies of misaligned AIs, I go further and claim it's important even for purely selfish diplomacy reasons https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/audRDmEEeLAdvz9iq/do-not-delete-your-misaligned-agi [LW · GW]

IIRC my main sysops suggestion was to not give the archival center the ability to transmit data out over the network.

I feel like the risk associated with keeping the weights encrypted in a way which requires >7/10 people to authorize shouldn't be that bad. Just make those 10 people be people who commit to making decryption decisions only based on welfare and are relatively high integrity.

Wouldn't the equivalent be more like burning a body of a dead person?

It's not like the AI would have a continuous stream of consciousness, and it's more that you are destroying the information necessary to run them. It seems to me that shutting off an AI is more similar to killing them.

Seems like the death analogy here is a bit spotty. I could see it going either way as a best fit.

Hmm. I think there are two dimensions to the advice (what is a reasonable distribution of timelines to have, vs what should I actually do).  It's perfectly fine to have some humility about one while still giving opinions on the other.  "If you believe Y, then it's reasonable to do X" can be a useful piece of advice.  I'd normally mention that I don't believe Y, but for a lot of conversations, we've already had that conversation, and it's not helpful to repeat it.

 

Timelines are a result of a person's intuitions about a technical milestone being reached in the future, it is super obviously impossible for us to have a consensus about that kind of thing.

Talking only synchronises beliefs if you have enough time to share all of the relevant information, with technical matters, you usually don't.

I agree with this in the world where people are being epistemically rigorous/honest with themselves about their timelines and where there's a real consensus view on them. I've observed that it's pretty rare for people to make decisions truly grounded in their timelines, or to do so only nominally, and I think there's a lot of social signaling going on when (especially younger) people state their timelines. 

I appreciate that more experienced people are willing to give advice within a particular frame ("if timelines were x", "if China did y", "if Anthropic did z", "If I went back to school", etc etc), even if they don't agree with the frame itself. I rely on more experienced people in my life to offer advice of this form ("I'm not sure I agree with your destination, but admit there's uncertainty, and love and respect you enough to advise you on your path"). 

Of course they should voice their disagreement with the frame (and I agree this should happen more for timelines in particular), but to gate direct counsel on urgent, object-level decisions behind the resolution of background disagreements is broadly unhelpful.

When someone says "My timelines are x, what should I do?", I actually hear like three claims:

• Timelines are x
• I believe timelines are x
• I am interested in behaving as though timelines are x

Evaluation of the first claim is complicated and other people do a better job of it than I do so let's focus on the others.

"I believe timelines are x" is a pretty easy roll to disbelieve. Under relatively rigorous questioning, nearly everyone (particularly everyone 'career-advice-seeking age') will either say they are deferring (meaning they could just as easily defer to someone else tomorrow), or admit that it's a gut feel, especially for their ~90 percent year, and especially for more and more capable systems (this is more true of ASI than weak AGI, for instance, although those terms are underspecified). Still others will furnish 0 reasoning transparency and thus reveal their motivations to be principally social (possibly a problem unique to the bay, although online e/acc culture has a similar Thing).

"I am interested in behaving as though timelines are x" is an even easier roll to disbelieve. Very few people act on their convictions in sweeping, life-changing ways without concomitant benefits (money, status, power, community), including people within AIS (sorry friends).

With these uncertainties, piled on top of the usual uncertainties surrounding timelines, I'm not sure I'd want anyone to act so nobly as to refuse advice to someone with different timelines.

If Alice is a senior AIS professional who gives advice to undergrads at parties in Berkeley (bless her!), how would her behavior change under your recommendation? It sounds like maybe she would stop fostering a diverse garden of AIS saplings and instead become the awful meme of someone who just wants to fight about a highly speculative topic. Seems like a significant value loss.

Their timelines will change some other day; everyone's will. In the meantime, being equipped to talk to people with a wide range of safety-concerned views (especially for more senior, or just Older people), seems useful.

harder to converge

Converge for what purpose? It feels like the marketplace of ideas is doing an ok job of fostering a broad portfolio of perspectives. If anything, we are too convergent and, as a consequence, somewhat myopic internally. Leopold mind-wormed a bunch of people until Tegmark spoke up (and that only somewhat helped). Few thought governance was a good idea until pretty recently (~3 years ago), and it would be going better if those interested in the angle weren't shouted down so emphatically to begin with.

If individual actors need to cross some confidence threshold in order to act, but the reasonable confidence interval is in fact very wide, I'd rather have a bunch of actors with different timelines, which roughly sum to the shape of the reasonable thing*, then have everyone working on the same overconfident assumption that later comes back to bite us (when we've made mistakes in the past, this is often why).

*Which is, by the way, closer to flat than most people's individual timelines

there are many such orgs, they're commonly known as fraudsters and scammers