Thanks for writing this up, glad to see the engagement! I've only skimmed and have not run this by any other AI 2027 authors, but a few thoughts on particular sections: > My predictions for AI by the end of 2027 I agree with most but not all of these in the median case, AI 2027 was roughly my 80th percentile aggressiveness prediction at the time. Edited to add, I feel like I should list the ones that I have <50% on explicitly: > AI still can't tell novel funny jokes, write clever prose, generate great business ideas, invent new in-demand products, or generate important scientific breakthroughs, except by accident. I disagree re: novel funny jokes, seems plausible that this bar has already been passed. I agree with the rest except maybe clever prose, depending on the operationalization. > LLMs are broadly acknowledged to be plateauing, and there is a broader discussion about what kind of AI will have to replace it. Disagree but not super confident. > Most breakthroughs in AI are not a result of directly increasing the general intelligence/"IQ" of the model, e.g. advances in memory, reasoning or agency. AI can stay on task much longer than before without supervision, especially for well-specified, simple tasks. Especially since AI coding platforms will have gotten better at tool use and allowing AI to manually test the thing they're working on. By the end of 2027, AI can beat a wide variety of video games is hasn't played before. I disagree with the first clause, but I'm not sure what you mean because advances in reasoning and agency seem to me like examples of increases in general intelligence. Especially staying on task for longer without supervision. Are you saying that these reasoning and agency advances will mostly come from scaffolding rather than the underlying model getting smarter? That I disagree with. > There is more public discussion on e.g. Hacker News about AI code rot and the downsides of using AI. People have been burned by relying too much on AI. But I think non-coders running businesses will still by hyped about AI in 2027. Disagree on the first two sentences. > AI still can't drive a damned car well enough that if I bought a car I wouldn't have to. I don't follow self-driving stuff much, but this might depend on location? Seems like good self-driving cars are getting rolled out in limited areas at the moment. ---------------------------------------- As you touch on later in your post, it's plausible that we made a mistake by focusing on 2027 in particular: > But I do worry about what happens in 2028, when everyone realizes none of the doomsday stuff predicted in 2025 actually came true, or even came close. Then the AI alignment project as a whole may risk being taken as seriously as the 2012 apocalypse theory was in 2013. The last thing you want is to be seen as crackpots. I think this is a very reasonable concern and we probably should have done better in our initial release making our uncertainty about timelines clear (and/or taking the time to rewrite and push back to a later time frame, e.g. once Daniel's median changed to 2028). We are hoping to do better on this in future releases, including via just having scenarios be further out, and perhaps better communicating our timelines distributions. Also: > Listening to several of the authors discuss the AI 2027 predictions after they were published leads me to believe they don't intuitively believe their own estimates. What do you mean by this? My guess is that it's related to the communciation issues on timelines? > The Takeoff Forecast is Based on Guesswork Agree. > The Presentation was Misleading > Nothing wrong with guesswork, of course, if it's all you've got! But I would have felt a lot better if the front page of the document had said "AI 2027: Our best guess about what AI progress might look like, formulated by using math to combine our arbitrary intuitions about what might happen." > > But instead it claims to be based on "trend extrapolations, wargames, expert feedback, experience at OpenAI, and previous forecasting successes", and links to 193 pages of data/theory/evidence. > > They never outright stated it wasn't based on vibes, of course, and if you dig into the document, that's what you find out. I very much understand this take and understand where you're coming from because it's a complaint I've had regarding some previous timelines/takeoff forecasts.  Probably some of our disagreement is very tied-in to the object-level disagreements about the usefulness of doing this sort of forecasting; I personally think that although the timelines and takeoff forecasts clearly involved a ton of guesswork, they are still some of the best forecasts out there, and we need to base our timelines and takeoff forecasts on something in the absence of good data. But still, since we both agree that the forecasts rely on lots of guesswork, even if we disagree on their usefulness, we might be able to have some common ground when discussing whether the presentation was misleading in this respect. I'll share a few thoughts from my perspective below: 1. I think it's a very tricky problem to communicate that we think that AI 2027 and its associated background research is some of the best stuff out there, but is still relying on tons of guesswork because there's simply not enough empirical data to forecast when AGI will arrive, how fast takeoff will be, and what effects it will have precisely. It's very plausible that we messed up in some ways, including in the direction that you posit. 2. Keep in mind that we have to optimize for a bunch of different audiences, I'd guess that for each direction (i.e. taking the forecast too seriously, vs. not seriously enough) many people came away with conclusions too far in that direction, from my perspective. This also means that some others have advertised our work in a way that seems overselling to me, though others have IMO undersold it. 3. As you say, we tried to take care to not overclaim regarding the forecast, in terms of the level of vibes it was based on. We also explicitly disclaimed our uncertainty in several places, e.g. in the expandables "Why our uncertainty increases substantially beyond 2026" and "Our uncertainty continues to increase." as well as "Why is it valuable?" right below the foreword. 4. Should we have had something stronger in the foreword or otherwise more prominent on the frontpage? Yeah, perhaps, we iterated on the language a bunch to try to make it convey all of (a) that we put quite a lot of work into it, (b) that we think it's state-of-the-art or close on most dimensions and represents subtantial intellectual progress, but also (c) giving the right impression about our uncertainty level and (d) not overclaiming regarding the methodology. But we might have messed up these tradeoffs. 1. You proposed "AI 2027: Our best guess about what AI progress might look like, formulated by using math to combine our arbitrary intuitions about what might happen." This seems pretty reasonable to me except as you might guess I take issue with the connotation of arbitary. In particular, I think there's reason to trust our intuitions regarding guesswork given that we've put more thinking time into this sort of thing than all but a few people in the world, our guesswork was also sometimes informed by surveys (which were still very non-robust, to be clear, but I think improving upon previous work in terms of connecting surveys to takeoff estimates), and we have a track record to at least some extent. So I agree with arbitrary in some sense in that we can't ground out our intuitions into solid data, but my guess is that it gives the wrong connotation in terms of to what weight the guesswork should be given relative to other forms of evidence, 1. I'd also not emphasize math if we're discussing the scenario as opposed to timelines or takeoff speeds in particular. 5. My best guess is for the timelines and takeoff forecast, we should have had a stronger disclaimer or otherwise made more clear in the summary that they are based on lots of guesswork. I also agree that the summaries at the top had pretty substantial room for improvement. 1. I'm curious what you would think of something like this disclaimer in the timelines forecast summary (and a corresponding one in takeoff): Disclaimer: This forecast relies substantially on intuitive judgment, and involves high levels of uncertainty. Unfortunately, we believe that incorporating intuitive judgment is necessary to forecast timelines to highly advanced AIs, since there simply isn’t enough evidence to extrapolate conclusively. 1. I've been considering adding something like this but haven't quite gotten to it due to various reasons, but potentially I should prioritize it more highly. 2. We're also working on updates to these models and will aim to do better at communicating in the future! And will take into account suggestions. 3. I think this might have happened because to us it's clear to us that we can't make these sorts of forecasts without tons of guesswork, and we didn't have much slack in terms of the time spent thinking about how these supplements would read to others; I perhaps made a similar mistake to one that I have previously criticized others for. 6. (I had edited to add this paragraph in, but I'm going to actually strike it out for now because I'm not sure I'm doing a good job accurately representing what happened and it seems important to do so precisely, but I'll still leave it up because I don't want to feel like I'm censoring something that I already had in a version of the comment.) Potentially important context is that our median expectation is that AI 2027 would do much worse than it did, so we were mostly spending time trying to increase the expected readership (while of course following other constraints like properly disclaiming uncertainty). I think we potentially should have spent a larger fraction of our time thinking "if this got a ton of readership then what would happen" and to be clear we did spend time thinking about this, but I think it might be important context to note that we did not expect AI 2027 to get so many readers so a lot of our headspace was around increasing readership. Linking to some other comments I've written that are relevant to this: here, here

What's your version of the story for how the "moderates" at OpenPhil ended up believing stuff even others can now see to be fucking nuts in retrospect and which "extremists" called out at the time, like "bio anchoring" in 2021 putting AGI in median fucking 2050, or Carlsmith's Multiple Stage Fallacy risk estimate of 5% that involved only an 80% chance anyone would even try to build agentic AI? Were they no true moderates?  How could anyone tell the difference in advance? From my perspective, the story is that "moderates" are selected to believe nice-sounding moderate things, and Reality is off doing something else because it doesn't care about fitting in the same way.  People who try to think like reality are then termed "extremist", because they don't fit into the nice consensus of people hanging out together and being agreeable about nonsense.  Others may of course end up extremists for other reasons.  It's not that everyone extreme is reality-driven, but that everyone who is getting pushed around by reality (instead of pleasant hanging-out forces like "AGI in 2050, 5% risk" as sounded very moderate to moderates before the ChatGPT Moment) ends up departing from the socially driven forces of what entitles you to sound terribly reasonable to the old AIco-OpenPhil cluster and hang out at their social gatherings without anyone feeling uncomfortable. Anyone who loves being an extremist will of course go instantly haywire a la Yampolskiy imagining that he has proven alignment impossible via Godelian fallacy so he can say 99.9999% doom.  But yielding to the psychological comfort of being a "moderate" will not get you any further in science than that.

I passed up an invitation to invest in Anthropic in the initial round which valued it at $1B (it's now planning a round at $170B valuation), to avoid contributing to x-risk. (I didn't want to signal that starting another AI lab was a good idea from a x-safety perspective, or that I thought Anthropic's key people were likely to be careful enough about AI safety. Anthropic had invited a number of rationalist/EA people to invest, apparently to gain such implicit endorsements.) This idea/plan seems to legitimize giving founders and early investors of AGI companies extra influence on or ownership of the universe (or just extremely high financial returns, if they were to voluntarily sell some shares to the public as envisioned here), which is hard for me to stomach from a fairness or incentives perspective, given that I think such people made negative contributions to our civilizational trajectory by increasing x-risk. I suspect that others will have other reasons (from other political or ethical perspectives) to object to granting or legitimizing a huge windfall to this small group of people, and it seems amiss that the post/paper is silent on the topic.