Wulky Wilkinsen — LessWrong

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Is there anything that can stop AGI development in the near term?

Wulky Wilkinsen

Assume that short timeline arguments are correct. (For previous discussion, see "What if AGI is near?".)

Some possible ideas:

A multilateral, international governmental/legal agreement to halt GPU production or ban AI research
- Surveillance systems that detect when someone is about to launch an AI system and report them to the authorities. Obviously this would be just an implementation detail of the above idea.
An agreement among prominent AI researchers (but not necessarily governments) in multiple countries that further progress is dangerous and should be halted until alignment is better understood
A global nuclear war or some other disaster that would halt economic progress and damage supply chains
- Nuclear EMPs that would damage many electrical systems, possibly including computing

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Replying toWhat if AGI is near?

Wulky Wilkinsen5y

What if AGI is near?

I don't understand how the Copernican argument works. Being alive in the moment before the first AGI exists is very unlikely, but surely it is very unlikely to be alive in any moment around the development of AGI in general. If anything, you could possibly argue that it's more likely we are in some kind of simulation than in base reality right before AGI takeoff. If that's not the point you're making, could you restate the argument?

What if AGI is near?

Wulky Wilkinsen

Consider the following observations:

The scaling hypothesis is probably true: we will likely continue to see great improvements in AI capabilities as model sizes increase.
- Sutskever mentioned that models currently under development already have dramatic and qualitative improvements (e.g. going more multimodal) over those already made in 2020.
AI model sizes are likely to increase very quickly over the short term.
- NVIDIA’s CEO: “We expect to see models with greater than 100 trillion parameters by 2023". Something 1000x the size of GPT-3, given its already shocking performance, is scary to imagine, to say the least.
- Even if OpenAI is cautious and will not go ahead with potentially catastrophic projects (dubious), the wide availability and rapidly decreasing cost

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