Hey Daniel, thanks for your comments here. The concern you bring up here is really important. I went back through this section with an eye toward “uniqueness.”
Looking back, I agree that the argument would be strengthened by an explicit comparison to other R&D work. My thought is still that both (1) technologies of national security and (2) especially lucrative tech have additional parallelization, since every actor has a strong incentive to chase and win it. But you’re right to point out that these factors aren’t wholly unique. I’d love to see more research on this. (I have more to look into as well. It might already be out there!)
Though one factor that... (read more)
Hey Nathan, thanks for your comments. A few quick responses:
On Taiwan Supply Chain:
On R&D Penalty:
Hey Tom, thanks again for your work creating the initial report and for kicking off this discussion. Apologies for the Christmastime delay in reply.
Two quick responses, focused on points of disagreement that aren’t stressed in my original text.
On AI-Generated Synthetic Data:
Breakthroughs in synthetic data would definitely help overcome my dataset quality concerns. Two main obstacles I’d want to see overcome: How will synthetic data retain (1) the fidelity to individual data points of ground truth (how well it represents the "real world" its simulation prepares models for) and (2) the higher-level distribution of datapoints.
On Abstraction with Scale:
I have spent some time studying Tom Davidson’s Open Philanthropy report on what a compute-centric framework says about AI takeoff speeds. This research culminated in a report of its own, which I presented to Davidson.
At his encouragement, I’m posting my review, which offers five independent arguments for extending the median timelines proposed in the initial report.
The Executive Summary (<5 min read) covers the key parts of each argument. Additional substantiation in the later, fuller sections allows deeper dives as desired. This work assumes familiarity with Davidson’s, but a Background Info appendix summarizes the central argument.
Thanks to Tom for his encouragement to share this publicly, and for his commitment to discussing these important topics in... (read 11348 more words →)
I agree that it would be better to say “adds five years under ‘Best Guess’ parameters,” or to just use “years” in the tagline. (Though I stand by the decision to compare worlds by using the best guess presets, if only to isolate the one variable under discussion.)
It makes sense that aggressive parameters reduce the difference, since they reach full automation in significantly less time. At parallelization penalty 0.7, Aggressive gets you there in 2027, while Best Guess takes until 2040! With Conservative parameters, the same .7 to .1 shift has even larger consequences.