Yes but GPT-3 offers us new evidence we should try to update on. It's debatable to say how many bits of evidence that provides, but we can also update based on this Discontinuous progress in history: an update:
Growth rates sharply changed in many trends, and this seemed strongly associated with discontinuities. If you experience a discontinuity, it looks like there’s a good chance you’re hitting a new rate of progress, and should expect more of that.
AlphaGo was something we saw before we expected it. GPT-3 text generator was something we saw before we expected it. They were discontinuities.
Lucky individuals often find something which has a long inference chain. Not a one-step improvement to existing theory, but many steps further. To the experts, it may look like a few new steps, combined masterfully. To the non-expert, they may need to learn about 100 new concepts for it to make sense. That's why 100 non-experts can't just invent general relativity, they need to take a 100 steps, 1 step each, but all in the same direction.
You are correct, and that simpler model gives an even greater risk. I'm skeptical about social distancing because hospitals become overcrowded once 1/1000 of the population gets infected, and they need one month to process the hospitalized. With that pace, the quarantine would need to last 83 years. Even if this estimate is wrong by 10x that implies quarantine duration of 8 years. So much about flattening the curve. The best hope is a vaccine, so the quarantine lasts for approx 1 year, but maybe much shorter if more resources are invested and barriers...
Perhaps I should have been more specific, I'm talking about a scenario where there is an actual machine (like a time machine but instead of travelling in time you travel between universes) in which you step and press a button, and then you appear in a parallel universe. In standard probability we have a potential future state of "I'm dead" and "I'm alive" but you can physically travel between those two future states, either one happens or the other happens. In the inter-universe travel scenario you can use the machine to ...
Perhaps I should have been more specific, I'm talking about a scenario where there is an actual machine (like a time machine but instead of travelling in time you travel between universes) in which you step and press a button, and then you appear in a parallel universe. It's not a question who claims anything, nor it is a question of random fluctuations, it's a question of whether that kind of machine can be built or not. If it can be built, then increasing quantum diversification reduces xrisk, because then the travelers can travel around...
It changes because with ordinary randomness you can't travel between different branches in the decision tree. In the thought experiment with the surgeon he actually physically travels to a parallel universe and saves a life of his copy there. So the expected long term utility is not 1 life saved but 10 lives saved.
Within the pessimistic hypothesis it does not matter who develops AGI, in any case our death is almost certain.