I think the word "capabilities" is actually not quite what the word we're looking for here, because the part of "capabilities" that negatively affects timelines is pretty much just scaling work. You can make a reasonable argument that the doomsday clock is based on how fast we get to an AI that's smarter than we are; which is to say, how quickly we end up being able to scale to however many neurons it takes to become smarter than humans. And I don't expect that prompt research or intepretability research or OOD research is really going to meani... (read more)
I think the word "capabilities" is actually not quite what the word we're looking for here, because the part of "capabilities" that negatively affects timelines is pretty much just scaling work. You can make a reasonable argument that the doomsday clock is based on how fast we get to an AI that's smarter than we are; which is to say, how quickly we end up being able to scale to however many neurons it takes to become smarter than humans. And I don't expect that prompt research or intepretability research or OOD research is really going to meani... (read more)