I don’t think the real divide is “doom tomorrow” vs “nothing to worry about.” The crux is a pretty straightforward philosophical question "what does it even mean to generalize intelligence and agency", how much can scaling laws tell us about that?

The back-and-forth over σ²’s and growth exponents feels like theatrics that bury the actual debate.

but what is the difference between a shoddy toy model and a real world pro "rigorous research"?

it's like asking between the difference between amateur toy audio gear, and real pro level audio gear... (which is not a simple thing given "prosumer products" dominate the landscape)

the only point in betting when "real AGI" will happen boils down to the payouts from gambling with this. are such gambles a zero sum game? does that depend on who escrows the bet??

what do I get if I am correct? how should the incorrect lose?

The primary question is always whether they'd have made those sorts of predictions based on the results they were seeing on the field from the same amount of time in the past.

Pre-CharGPT I very much doubt the bullish predictions on AI would've been made the way they are now.

The recent Apple "LLMs can't reason yet" paper was exactly this. They just tested if models could run an exponential number of steps.

Of course, they gave it a terrible clickbait title and framed the question and graphs incorrectly. But if they did the study better it would have been "How long of a sequence of algorithmic steps can LLMs execute before making a mistake or giving up?"

The person you're replying to said "For me the risk of timelines is that they're unknowable due to the unpredictable nature of ASI." So they are predicting >90% chance of doom, but not when that will happen. Given that there is already a 100% chance of death at some unknown point in the future, why would this cause GP to start living like a terminal cancer patient (presumably defined as someone with a >99% chance of death in the next year)?

No – I like this. Most people who talk about AI risk, do not take it seriously in my opinion. I've been having nightmares about AIs since I was kid and these have only become more frequent and more realistic the older I've gotten. I studied AI at university because I was always scared and equally fascinated by AI. Even today most of my friends are friends because they're the only people I've been able to find who are willing to talk to me about AI risk for hours on end. Everyone else thinks I'm crazy, but I take this super seriously and I get frustrated by people who treat it purely as a critical thinking exercise, given in all likelihood their family and children will be dead or worse in a few years.

To answer your question at very a high-level, I'm pretty depressed so I'm not bothered at all about dying which helps with the emotional side of this. I really am not bothered that I think I'll be dead soon – and a quick death is my highest probability positive outcome for what is coming for me personally.

My primary concern, and the thing that keeps me up at night, is the risk of new forms of torture which are so inconceivably bad that any positive outcomes from ASI would never be worth the risk. In a few years if things go "well" and we get ASI it should be completely feasible to 3d print a torture helmet which will simulate the feeling of being burnt to death for 100,000+ years. Assuming this is an experience that's physically possible to experience then signalling the brain to experience is just an engineering problem – and likely a fairly trivial one for an ASI. Again, death should be seen as a very positive outcome. ASI will create hell in the literal sense. The question here really isn't whether ASI could create hells, or whether someone out there might be messed up enough to send someone to hell, but whether humanity will create ASI. If you think we will then we will create hell and we will banish people to it.

So if there's even a 0.1% chance of something this bad happening to me I plan to check out early. That said, I see this as a low-probability risk on an individual basis (I think it's much much more likely I'll die of a designer virus or something similar). Even more likely is that ASI introduce several new civilisational risks in rapid succession and one or two of them kill most humans alive today. But again, I will remind you that should this not happen then we should assume many people alive today will be subjected to unimaginable horrors. Use cases of new forms of torture are very obvious and will be rapidly adopted in totalitarian states, but I'd also question whether democracies will end up as totalitarian states in a world where ASI exists – I think this depends on whether you believe ASI is likely to concentrate power (which I suspect it probably will). We should neither assume the invention of hell is unlikely or unlikely to used.

I appreciate what I'm saying sounds crazy today, but magical sticks which go "bang" and immediately kill the people they're pointed towards also sounds crazy to most humans who ever lived. We always underestimate how much technology can alter the boundaries of fiction, and ASI will likely change those boundaries faster and more significantly than we can possibly imagine today. Even I as a AI doomer am probably understating the extent of the horror which could be coming to you and your family. Your kids may suffer unimaginably for millions of years, trillions even.

Other low probability outcomes include scenarios where AI advancements are fundamentally destabilising and where events like mass-job loss, rioting and war results in a halting of civilisational progress and mass death – largely from famine. I'm preparing for these outcomes as much as I possibly can since this these are the only outcomes I have any agency over. I grow a lot of food, I have chickens and keep years of food supplies (needed for nuclear winter scenarios). I'm in the process of fitting a water butt in my garden so I'm not dependant on the public water supply. I keep a large sash of firewood and heating fuel for cooking and heat if energy is cut off. I have been amassing tools for a few years now so I can repair things and can produce various items (including weapons). I will continue preparing for these scenarios for as long as I have left.

Realistically though there's very little I can do in most scenarios and I'm no where near as prepared as I'd like to be. But really I just hope to avoid suffering and most accept most outcomes I have very little agency over. I just hope to die quickly or have the strength to check out while I have the chance.

I guess the sad truth is I'd consider being diagnosed with terminal cancer right now as a positive improvement in my expected life outcome. It's quite hard to over state how concerned I am. The end of humanity isn't the bad outcome imo, it's neutral from the perspective of human suffering and dramatically understates the risks coming.

But hey, hopefully I'm wrong =)

I agree, but I think you're assuming a certain type of person who understands that a detailed prediction can be both wrong and right simultaneously. And that it's not so much about getting all the details right, but being in the right ballpark.

Unfortunately there's a huge number of people who get obsessed about details and then nit pick. I see this with Eliezer Yudkowsky all the time where 90% of the criticism of his views are just nit picking the weaker predictions he makes while ignoring his stronger predictions regarding the core risks which could result in those bad things happening. I think Yudkowsky opens himself up to this though because he often makes very detailed predictions about how things might play out and this largely why he's so controversial, in my opinion.

I really liked AI 2027 personally. I thought specifically the tabletop exercises were a nice heuristic for predicting how actors might behave in certain scenarios. I also agree that it presented a plausible narrative for how things could play out. I'm also glad they did wimp out with the bad ending. Another problem I have with people are concerned about AI risk is that they scare away from speaking plainly about the fact if things go poorly your love ones in a few years will probably either be either be dead, in suspended animation on a memory chip, or in a literal digital hell.

I have more fun reading it as a kind of collaborative real-time sci-fi story. Reads right out of a Lem novel.

Mine's different. She's cuter.

On a more serious note. Have these AI doom guys ever dealt with one of these cutting edge models on out of distribution data? They suck so so bad. There's only so much data available, the models have basically slurped it all.

Let alone like the basic thermodynamics of it. There's only so much entropy out there in cyberspace to harvest, at some point you run into a wall and then you have to build real robots to go collect more in the real world. And how's that going for them?

Also I can't help remarking: the metaphor you chose is science fiction.