dschwarz

Contra papers claiming superhuman AI forecasting

[Conflict of interest disclaimer: We are FutureSearch, a company working on AI-powered forecasting and other types of quantitative reasoning. If thin LLM wrappers could achieve superhuman forecasting performance, this would obsolete a lot of our work.] Widespread, misleading claims about AI forecasting Recently we have seen a number of papers – (Schoenegger et al., 2024, Halawi et al., 2024, Phan et al., 2024, Hsieh et al., 2024) – with claims that boil down to “we built an LLM-powered forecaster that rivals human forecasters or even shows superhuman performance”. These papers do not communicate their results carefully enough, shaping public perception in inaccurate and misleading ways. Some examples of public discourse: Ethan Mollick (>200k followers) tweeted the following about the paper Wisdom of the Silicon Crowd: LLM Ensemble Prediction Capabilities Rival Human Crowd Accuracy by Schoenegger et al.: A post on Marginal Revolution with the title and abstract of the paper Approaching Human-Level Forecasting with Language Models by Halawi et al. elicits responses like * "This is something that humans are notably terrible at, even if they're paid to do it. No surprise that LLMs can match us." * "+1 The aggregate human success rate is a pretty low bar" A Twitter thread with >500k views on LLMs Are Superhuman Forecasters by Phan et al. claiming that “AI […] can predict the future at a superhuman level” had more than half a million views within two days of being published. The number of such papers on AI forecasting, and the vast amount of traffic on misleading claims, makes AI forecasting a uniquely misunderstood area of AI progress. And it’s one that matters. What does human-level or superhuman forecasting mean? "Human-level" or "superhuman" is a hard-to-define concept. In an academic context, we need to work with a reasonable operationalization to compare the skill of an AI forecaster with that of humans. One reasonable and practical definition of a sup

182Sep 12, 2024

dschwarz

Message

425

15y

A Guide For LLM-Assisted Web Research

It's hard to imagine doing web research without using LLMs. Chatbots may be the first thing you turn to for questions like: What are the companies currently working on nuclear fusion and who invested in them? What is the performance gap between open and closed-weight models on the MMLU benchmark?...

Jun 26, 202546

Superhuman Coders in AI 2027 - Not So Fast

Thank you @elifland for reviewing this post. He and AI Futures are planning to publish updates to the AI 2027 Timeline Forecast soon. AI 2027 (also launched in this LW post) forecasts an R&D-based AI takeoff starting with the development of Superhuman Coders[1] within a frontier lab. FutureSearch co-authored the...

May 1, 202567

Contra papers claiming superhuman AI forecasting

Sep 12, 2024182

Unit economics of LLM APIs

Disclaimer 1: Our calculations are rough in places; information is sparse, guesstimates abound. Disclaimer 2: This post draws from public info on FutureSearch as well as a paywalled report. If you want the paywalled numbers, email dan@futuresearch.ai with your LW account name and we’ll send you the report for free....

Aug 27, 202443

[EAForum xpost] A breakdown of OpenAI's revenue

We estimate that, as of June 12, 2024, OpenAI has an annualized revenue (ARR) of: $1.9B for ChatGPT Plus (7.7M global subscribers), $714M from ChatGPT Enterprise (1.2M seats), $510M from the API, and $290M from ChatGPT Team (from 980k seats) (Full report in https://app.futuresearch.ai/reports/3Li1, methods described in https://futuresearch.ai/openai-revenue-report.) We looked...

Jul 10, 202457

[EA xpost] The Rationale-Shaped Hole At The Heart Of Forecasting

An excerpt from the above that will be relevant to this crowd: Ben Landau-Taylor of Bismarck Analysis wrote a piece on March 6 called “Probability Is Not A Substitute For Reasoning”, citing a piece where he writes: > There has been a great deal of research on what criteria must...

Apr 2, 202422

Metaculus is seeking Software Engineers

(See Metaculus's previous career-tagged posts here, here, and here.) tl;dr Metaculus is now hiring Frontend Engineers and Full Stack Engineers. Since 2015, Metaculus has been a core part of the epistemic infrastructure at the heart of the LW/OB/EA world. I'm posting here because I myself was just hired at Metaculus...

Nov 5, 202218

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

dschwarz

dschwarz

dschwarz

Contra papers claiming superhuman AI forecasting

Superhuman Coders in AI 2027 - Not So Fast

[EAForum xpost] A breakdown of OpenAI's revenue

A Guide For LLM-Assisted Web Research

dschwarz

A Guide For LLM-Assisted Web Research

Superhuman Coders in AI 2027 - Not So Fast

Contra papers claiming superhuman AI forecasting

Unit economics of LLM APIs

[EAForum xpost] A breakdown of OpenAI's revenue

[EA xpost] The Rationale-Shaped Hole At The Heart Of Forecasting

Metaculus is seeking Software Engineers

Contra papers claiming superhuman AI forecasting

Superhuman Coders in AI 2027 - Not So Fast

[EAForum xpost] A breakdown of OpenAI's revenue

A Guide For LLM-Assisted Web Research

A Guide For LLM-Assisted Web Research

Superhuman Coders in AI 2027 - Not So Fast

Contra papers claiming superhuman AI forecasting

Unit economics of LLM APIs

[EAForum xpost] A breakdown of OpenAI's revenue

[EA xpost] The Rationale-Shaped Hole At The Heart Of Forecasting

Metaculus is seeking Software Engineers