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My AI Timelines Have Sped Up
- zitterbewegung 6y agoEveryone remembers when you are right and no one remembers when you are wrong when you make timelines like this.
- paulcole 6y agoHonestly nobody’s going to remember this prediction either way.
- EchoAce 6y agoReally? He’s a researcher at Google Brain; it’s not like his words have no weight.
- paulcole 6y agoBig echo chamber here. 99+% of people (myself included) have never even heard of Google Brain.
- crittendenlane 6y agoI mean, I have no idea what the expert climate science groups are but I still trust that they have a better idea of what's going on than I do. In this case, they just happen to know that this is one expert AI group.
- umvi 6y agoDang, 90% chance we'll have AGI* in 50 years? I would bet money against that prediction if I could. Any bookies out there? There's just no way AGI can replace blue collar work like plumbers and electricians, etc. that quickly. Programmers, also unlikely. Sure, you can have AIs generate more code for you, but then you'll just have the programmers working one abstraction layer up from that. Also, AI-generated entertainment always has and always will suck. I will eat my hat if an AI in 50 years can generate a full length, original hollywood-esque movie that I enjoy. Heck, I'll even settle for a book that can rival human authors. Sure, I could see a lot of medical professions and other "knowledge bank" type jobs being replaced. I've always thought optometrists could largely be replaced with "measure my prescription" booths controlled by a computer. But anything requiring any creative juice whatsoever will likely not be replaced. *Yes, it's not true AGI but AI that replaces 95% of all jobs
- melling 6y agoIn 1900 the earth’s population was 1.6 billion. In 1903 the Wright Brothers built the first airplane. In 1947, humans flew at supersonic speed for the first time. That was in the span of 50 years. 22 years later, we were on the moon. A lot can happen in 50-70 years. We now have 7 billion people, with more of the world coming online to do R&D. China, specifically, has made it a goal to lead the world in AI by 2025. India’s economy should grow over the next 2 decades and they will also become a world leader. With so many resources, the world should easily advance more in the next 50 than it did in the last 100 years.
- zxwx 6y agoIn 70 years of physics we went from the photoelectric effect to the Standard Model. But for the last 50ish, it remains the standard. 70 years from the first flight to the concorde and the saturn 5. But in the 50 years since, improvements in aerospace have been incremental. In 75 years we went from ENIAC to TFLOPS in a laptop. But looks like that breakneck pace is slowing down sharply. We've been doing AI nearly as long, and have gone from say, Eliza to GPT-3. A huge advance, but not AGI. A lot can happen in 50 years, but we've already had our first 70ish years with AI without an AGI breakthrough. To the definition of AGI in the link, maybe a hundred million data scientists can hone a million models, one per "economically viable" task, and start chipping away at the 95% of the economy target, but till now I'd wager AI has put many more people to work than out of it.
- dwaltrip 6y agoYou have a good point. However, to be a bit pedantic, fully reusable rockets, which we are very much knocking on the door of, are a major stepwise improvement. It just goes to show that technological advancement can happen rather unpredictably.
- 300bps 6y agoWhen I was 14, I was 6'5". Extrapolating that out, I should probably be 100' tall by now.
- ouid 6y ago"10% chance by 2045, 50% chance by 2050" I'm really pessimistic about the next 30 years, but really optimistic about the next 5 after that.
- computerphage 6y agoFrom the post: "I also noticed that my 2015 prediction placed 10% to 50% in a 5 year range, and 50% to 90% in a 20 year range. AGI is a long-tailed event, and there’s a real possibility it’s never viable, but a 5-20 split is absurdly skewed. I’m adjusting accordingly."
- alpineidyll3 6y agoThe power cost of transistorized agi will never compete with meat neurons , ever. It's still off by like 9 orders of magnitude and worsening
- computerphage 6y agoSo, you think the median estimate (50% estimate) is in 25 Billion years?
- jaakl 6y agoNeurons (soul) are easier part. You’d need to replicate also meat (body) part and we are now at about 0% of this. Our problems in 2050 are easy to predict through: we’ll be struggeling in deep levels of the climate crisis with 99.9% probability.
- dfalzone 6y agoWhy?
- jdkee 6y agoIt is a race between AI and the massive disruptions of civilization due to climate change and the mass extinction of ecosystems. The fulfillment of those two are not mutually exclusive.
- dane-pgp 6y agoI agree, and I think that the Venn diagram of possible futures to consider includes not just AI, climate change and mass extinction of ecosystems, but also nuclear war.
- monadic2 6y agoOr even just nuclear accidents.
- mempko 6y agoNot sure why you are being downvoted. This is a post about predicting the future and your comment highlights an uncomfortable truth. That climate change is really disruptive and could disrupt this quest for AI.
- loopz 6y agoIt will also spur practical applications to find solutions, not thinking of AGI.
- causality0 6y agoI think there are fundamental questions still unanswered that could put the brakes on the whole thing. For example, I would put forth that for a given problem, there is a lower limit to how simple you can make divided pieces of that problem. You can't compute the trajectory of a thrown baseball using only a single transistor. Granted most problems can be divided into incredibly simple steps. The question we face is "is AGI reductive enough for human beings to create it?" Is the minimum work-unit for planning and constructing an AGI small enough to be understood by a human? That's of course putting aside the problem of scale. The neocortex alone has 160 trillion synapses, each of which exhibits behavior far more complex than a single transistor. You could argue that for many commercially-viable tasks we've found much better ways than nature, and that's true, but AGI is a different game entirely. Our current AI methodologies may be as unrelated to AGI as a spear is to a nuclear missile despite them both performing the same basic function.
- beisner 6y agoWhile I agree that designing and training a model the size of a human brain from scratch may well be an undertaking too great for any one human or even group of humans, that’s not how humans are created! I’d say the fact that we start life as a single cell with - at maximum - only a couple of gigabytes of information packed in our DNA and yet turn out to have profound intelligence is strong evidence that we might be able to design a system that - through some combination of obscenely efficient simple-ish learning algorithms - might be able to bootstrap its own intelligence in a similar fashion to how humans do. This isn’t necessarily a call for research to study how human embryos turn into thinking, feeling people, but more a loose upper bound on the complexity of the initial size of a model that could become AGI.
- computerphage 6y agoI agree with you, but it is also worth considering how much computation had to go into producing those couple of gigabytes.
- lostmsu 6y agoI think it is incorrect to say, that synapses exhibit more complex behavior in this context. How much of their behavior is actually part of cognition, as opposed to the needs of their own survival?
- bra-ket 6y agoWishful thinking, make large and dumb models even larger, throw in more data and it will somehow magically lead to artificial common sense. The only thing missing is philosopher's stone and the right mix of hyperparameters.
- R0b0t1 6y ago>make large and dumb models even larger, throw in more data and it will somehow magically lead to artificial common sense. What exactly do you think a human brain is?
- heavyset_go 6y agoNot an organ that performs backpropagation or gradient descent.
- AQXt 6y agoWhat if I tell you it is? Will that information back-propagate into your brain?
- heavyset_go 6y agoI'd ask you to show me how and where backpropogation takes place in the brain. Then I'd ask how thin you're willing to stretch the "neural net" metaphor to re-apply it to biology.
- R0b0t1 6y agoAdmittedly backpropogation/gradient descent bother me a fair bit but in a human brain what is desireable still has some kind of encoding, the mechanism is just more complicated and more general.
- nradov 6y agoWe don't know exactly what a human brain is. That's kind of the problem.
- stuhlmueller 6y agoAlex Irpan's post inspired the AGI timelines discussion at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hQysqfSEzciRazx8k https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hQysqfSEzciRazx8k which shows 12 people's timelines as probability distributions over future years and their reasoning behind the distributions. (I work on Elicit, the tool used in the thread.)
- 1wheel 6y agoHave you tried plotting the CDFs? Might be easier to read than the overlaid areas.
- stuhlmueller 6y agoGood idea. We'll integrate that into Elicit in a few weeks. In the meantime, here's a Colab that shows the CDFs: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1pl3fIaeIKIS77IDM_rnaFUyPpyRepFmT?usp=sharing https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1pl3fIaeIKIS77IDM_rn...
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- ddmma 6y agoCOVID-19 speedup quite many digital transformations like wars created infrastructures and advanced technologies. This might be the stone age of AI but one day some people will create one ‘particle collider’ as planet brain.
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- red2awn 6y agoNarrow AI has made a lot of progress in recent years, but in my opinion we are completely lost regarding AGI.
- Findeton 6y agoNot completely, see this paper on a new neurobiological theory on consciousness https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(20)30175-3 https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S136... and this Twitter thread discussing it https://twitter.com/jaaanaru/status/1298164256777658370 https://twitter.com/jaaanaru/status/1298164256777658370
- lostmsu 6y agoThis basically matches the timeline I arrived to after seeing GPT-2 in action, except 10% by 2045 is too low (coincidentally, he realized that also mismatches 50% by 2050). I believe most people underestimate chances of AGI arrival because they overestimate humans. The famous post "Humans who are not concentrating are not general intelligences" got most of the point.
- Cyphase 6y agohttps://www.skynettoday.com/editorials/humans-not-concentrating https://www.skynettoday.com/editorials/humans-not-concentrat...
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- goatlover 6y agoHowever, much of human intelligence is based on being social animals, who have to survive in complex, changing environments. That's what has traditionally been underestimated since the 1950s at the start of AI research.
- Pandabob 6y agoHere's a random collection of thoughts that I have about the progress of Artificial Intelligence (AI): Machine learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) in particular benefit from fast computer chips. The most impressive gains in AI in the 2010s (Computer Vision & Natural Language Processing) were made thanks to DL. There's a famous post by AI researcher Rich Sutton, which summarises this fairly neatly [1]. Now, this connection between DL and fast chips would tie the progress of AI pretty tightly to the progress of Moore's Law [2]. There's some compelling evidence that Moore's Law is at least slowing down [3]. On the other hand, there are industry experts like Jim Keller who pretty strongly disagree with these assessments [4] and even TSMC seems to be bullish on being able to keep up with Moore's Law [5]. Some estimates of GPT-3s training cost put it in the range of ~5-10 million dollars [6]. It's hard to say how big of an impact on the economy GPT-3 will have. It's probably safe to assume though, that OpenAI is already working on GPT-4. The jump in parameter sizes from GPT-2 to 3 was roughly 100x (1.5 billion vs. 175 billion) and I'm assuming the price of training the model increased in roughly the same proportion (I might be wrong here and if anyone can point me to evidence on this, it would be much appreciated). With these assumptions, and provided that GPT-4 won't be affected by diminishing returns of adding more parameters (big if), the price for it would be somewhere between 500 million and a billion dollars. That's still not an insane amount of money to put into R&D, but you'd probably want it to be at least be somehow economically viable to be able to justify putting a hundred billion dollars into GPT-5. All this is to say, that I find making predictions of the progress of AI really hard due to the large amount of uncertainty related to the field and the underlying technologies (mainly the hardware). [1]: http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html [2]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.05558.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.05558.pdf [3]: https://p4.org/assets/P4WS_2019/Speaker_Slides/9_2.05pm_John_Hennessey.pdf https://p4.org/assets/P4WS_2019/Speaker_Slides/9_2.05pm_John... [4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc [5]: https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/09/13/tsmc-thinks-it-can-uphold-moores-law-for-decades/ https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/09/13/tsmc-thinks-it-can-u... [6]: https://venturebeat.com/2020/06/11/openai-launches-an-api-to-commercialize-its-research/ https://venturebeat.com/2020/06/11/openai-launches-an-api-to...
- AQXt 6y ago> "For this post, I’m going to take artificial general intelligence (AGI) to mean an AI system that matches or exceeds humans at almost all (95%+) economically valuable work." One doesn't have to be "economically valuable" to be considered intelligent. Think of philosophy majors, for instance. Now, imagine an AI that could replicate the intelligence of a 6 year old; it wouldn't be "economically valuable" at first, but it would keep learning, year after year, until it exceed humans. Wouldn't that be a prime example of an AGI? Or would it only be accepted as such when it matched or surpassed humans "at almost all (95%+) economically valuable work"? What if it decided to pursue a degree in philosophy? When it happens, we will be way past the first AGI, and entering the singularity.
- amanaplanacanal 6y agoI don’t credit any predictions about AGI. We don’t know enough about how human intelligence works. On the software side, we don’t know what pieces we are missing or what discoveries need to be made to make progress. There is no way to predict when scientific discoveries will happen before they happen. This is a fools errand.