Updating my AI timelines

What level of taxation do you think would delay timelines by even one year?

What is your source for the claim that effective compute for AI is doubling more than once per year? And do you mean effective compute in the largest training runs, or effective compute available in the world more generally?

"Effective compute" is the combination of hardware growth and algorithmic progress? If those are multiplicative rather than additive, slowing one of the factors may only accomplish little on its own, but maybe it could pave the way for more significant changes when you slow both at the same time? 

Unfortunately, it seems hard to significantly slow algorithmic progress. I can think of changes to publishing behaviors (and improving security) and pausing research on scary models (for instance via safety evals). Maybe things like handicapping talent pools via changes to immigration policy, or encouraging capability researchers to do other work. But that's about it. 

Still, combining different measures could be promising if the effects are multiplicative rather than additive. 

Edit: Ah, but I guess your point is that even a 100% tax on compute wouldn't really change the slope of the compute growth curve – it would only move the curve rightward and delay a little. So we don't get a multiplicative effect, unfortunately. We'd need to find an intervention that changes the steepness of the curve.   

If the explicit goal of the regulation is to delay AI capabilities, and to implement that via taxes, seems like one could figure out something to make it longer. Also, a few months still seems quite helpful and would class as "substantially" in my mind.

I played with davinci, text-davinci-002, and text-davinci-003, if I recall correctly. The last model had only been out for a few days at most, however, before ChatGPT was released.

Of course, I didn't play with any of these models in enough detail to become an expert prompt engineer. I mean, otherwise I would have made the update sooner

Prompt
"Question.
Bob the policeman was running after a thief. Bob ran very slowly because he was not fit. The thief was running very fast. When Bob was crossing a railroad, he slipped and fell. The road was slippery because Ann spilled some oil there. The thief got away. If Ann had not spilled oil, would the thief had gotten away? Explain your answer.

Let us think."

 Reply: "If Ann had not spilled oil, would the thief had gotten away?

The answer is no. If there was no oil, Bob would not have slipped, and would have been able to catch the thief."

Prompt
"Pete threw a rock at a window. Steve also threw a rock at the same window. The window shattered. If Pete did not throw the rock, but Steve still threw the rock, would the window shatter?
Let us think logically."
Reply:
"If Pete did not throw the rock, then the rock would not have hit the window and the window would not have shattered."

Using nat.dev, I find that 002, 003, and Turbo all get the same result, wrong on the first and right on the second. This is an example of Turbo being Inferior to Chat. I also tried Cohere, which got both. I also tried Claude. Full v1.2 got both wrong. Instant 1.0, which should be inferior, got the second correct. It also produced a wordy answer to the first which I give half credit because it said that it was difficult but possible for the slow policeman to catch the fast thief. I only tried each twice, with and without "Let us think," which made no difference to the first. I almost didn't bother adding it to the second since they did so well without it. Adding it made 002 and Claude-instant fail, but Claude1.2 succeed. (I also tried llama and alpaca, but they timed out.)

Excellent, thanks for this detailed critique! I think this might be the best that post has gotten thus far, I'll probably link to it in the future.

Point by point reply, in case you are interested:

2022-2023: Agree. Note that I didn't forecast that an AI could buy you a USB stick by 2022; I said people were dreaming of such things but that they didn't actually work yet.

2024: We definitely have a real disagreement about AI capabilities here; I do expect fine-tuned bureaucracies to be useful for some fairly autonomous things by 2024. (For example, the USB stick thing I expect to work fine by 2024). Not just babbling and fooling humans and forcing people to interact with a company through them. 

Re propaganda/persuasion: I am not sure we disagree here, but insofar as we disagree I think you are correct. We agree about what various political actors will be doing with their models--propaganda, censorship, etc. We disagree about how big an effect this will have on the populace. Or at least, 2021-me disagrees with 2022-you. I think 2022-me has probably come around to your position as well; like you say, it just takes time for these sorts of things to influence the public + there'll probably be a backlash / immunity effect. Idk.

2025: I admit I overestimated how hard diplomacy would turn out to be. In my defense, Cicero only won because the humans didn't know they were up against a bot. Moreover it's a hyper-specialized architecture trained extensively on Diplomacy, so it indeed doesn't have general reasoning skills at all.

We continue to disagree about the potential effectiveness of fine-tuned bureaucracies. To be clear I'm not confident, but it's my median prediction.

I projected a 10x decrease in hardware costs, and also a 10x improvement in algorithms/software, from 2020 to 2025. I stand by that prediction.

2026: 

We disagree about whether understanding is (or will be) there. I think yes, you think no. I don't think that these AIs will be "merely symbol manipulators" etc. I don't think the data-poisoning effect will be strong enough to prevent this.

As mentioned above, I do take the point that society takes a long time to change and probably I shouldn't expect the propaganda etc. to make that much of a difference in just a few years. Idk.

I'm not conflating those things, I know they are different. I am and was asserting that the chatbots would actually have understanding, at least in all the behaviorally relevant senses (though I'd argue also in the philosophical senses as well). You are correct that I didn't argue for this in the text -- but that wasn't the point of the text, the text was stating my predictions, not attempting to argue for them.


ETA: I almost forgot, it sounds like you mostly agree with my predictions, but think AGI still won't be nigh even in my 2026 world? Or do you instead think that the various capabilities demonstrated in the story won't occur in real life by 2026? This is important because if 2026 comes around and things look more or less like I said they would, I will be saying that AGI is very near. Your original claim was that in the next few years the median LW timeline would start visibly clashing with reality; so you must think that things in real-life 2026 won't look very much like my story at all. I'm guessing the main way it'll be visibly different, according to you, is that AI still won't be able to do autonomous things like go buy USB sticks? Also they won't have true understanding -- but what will that look like? Anything else?





 

 I predict by this date 2023 your median will be at least 5 years sooner. 

That's possible. I'm already trying to "price in" what I expect from GPT-4 into my timeline, which I expect to be very impressive.

It's perhaps worth re-emphasizing that my median timeline is so far in the future primarily because I'm factoring in delays, and because I set a very high bar. >30% GWP growth has never happened in human history. I think we've seen up to 14% growth in some very fast growing nations a few times, but that's been localized, and never at the technological frontier.

By these standards, the internet and tech revolution of the 1990s barely mattered. I could definitely see something as large as the rise of the internet happening in the next 10 years. But to meet my high bar, we'll likely need to see something radically changing the way we live our lives (or something that makes us go extinct).

It's 2023 and uhh...yeah.