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The future of AI according to thousands of forecasters
- notahacker 3y agoThe numbers there seem odd (or did before the page broke, possibly due to the HN 'hug of death') 90% chance of near term "human level" AI but only a 75% chance someone tries to influence the US election with "AI driven misinformation" which for most definitions of "AI" and "misinformation" is already happening?
- ddp26 3y agoHug of death is fixed, even this modest traffic was too much for our cache. | 90% chance of near term "human level" AI but only a 75% chance someone tries to influence the US election with "AI driven misinformation" which for most definitions of "AI" and "misinformation" is already happening? Yes, if 2040 is "near term". The majority view is that before 2025, the only major AI safety concerns are deepfakes, misinformation, and maybe social engineering. But over the subsequent years, the consensus shifts to predicting widespread disruption.
- malfist 3y agoSomething about the page is certainly broke. I don't get the graphs to load until I use the mouse wheel on their ui elements
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- vok 3y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36486490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36486490
- ilaksh 3y agoNowhere do they define "AGI". I guarantee that is a big reason why the predictions have so much variance. For many people, what GPT-4 does qualified as AGI -- up until GPT-4 came out and then everyone seemed to decide that AGI meant ASI. I am guessing for many people answering this poll it means "a full emulation of a person". Or maybe it had to be "alive". The thing that irritates me so much is that there is this lack of definition or moving of goalposts and also stupidly people seem to assume that AI can't be general purpose or useful unless it has all of those animal/human characteristics. GPT-4 is very general. Make it say 10-20 times faster, open up the image modality to the public, and you will be able to do most human tasks with it. You don't need to invent a lot of other stuff to be general purpose. You DO need to invent a lot of other stuff to become some kind of humanlike digital god. But that is not the least bit necessary to accomplish most human work output.
- davidmanheim 3y ago> Nowhere do they define "AGI" Ummm, maybe you should have looked? At the top of the very first prediction, here: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-general-intelligence/ https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-... We will thus define "an AI system" as a single unified software system that can satisfy the following criteria, all completable by at least some humans. Able to reliably pass a 2-hour, adversarial Turing test during which the participants can send text, images, and audio files (as is done in ordinary text messaging applications) during the course of their conversation. An 'adversarial' Turing test is one in which the human judges are instructed to ask interesting and difficult questions, designed to advantage human participants, and to successfully unmask the computer as an impostor. A single demonstration of an AI passing such a Turing test, or one that is sufficiently similar, will be sufficient for this condition, so long as the test is well-designed to the estimation of Metaculus Admins. Has general robotic capabilities, of the type able to autonomously, when equipped with appropriate actuators and when given human-readable instructions, satisfactorily assemble a (or the equivalent of a) circa-2021 Ferrari 312 T4 1:8 scale automobile model. A single demonstration of this ability, or a sufficiently similar demonstration, will be considered sufficient. High competency at a diverse fields of expertise, as measured by achieving at least 75% accuracy in every task and 90% mean accuracy across all tasks in the Q&A dataset developed by Dan Hendrycks et al.. Able to get top-1 strict accuracy of at least 90.0% on interview-level problems found in the APPS benchmark introduced by Dan Hendrycks, Steven Basart et al. Top-1 accuracy is distinguished, as in the paper, from top-k accuracy in which k outputs from the model are generated, and the best output is selected. By "unified" we mean that the system is integrated enough that it can, for example, explain its reasoning on a Q&A task, or verbally report its progress and identify objects during model assembly. (This is not really meant to be an additional capability of "introspection" so much as a provision that the system not simply be cobbled together as a set of sub-systems specialized to tasks like the above, but rather a single system applicable to many problems.) Resolution will come from any of three forms, whichever comes first: (1) direct demonstration of such a system achieving ALL of the above criteria, (2) confident credible statement by its developers that an existing system is able to satisfy these criteria, or (3) judgement by a majority vote in a special committee composed of the question author and two AI experts chosen in good faith by him, for the sole purpose of resolving this question. Resolution date will be the first date at which the system (subsequently judged to satisfy the criteria) and its capabilities are publicly described in a talk, press release, paper, or other report available to the general public.
- malfist 3y ago> Metaculus predicts a 75% likelihood of an attempt to influence the 2024 US presidential election with AI-driven misinformation. Hasn't that already happened? Wasn't DeSantis caught running deepfaked voices in an ad? Or am I misremembering something
- davidmanheim 3y agoIt's more specific than that once they actually operationalize the question: This question resolves as YES if, in Meta's 2024 Q4 Quarterly Adversarial Threat Report, Meta claims that there was at least one "coordinated inauthentic behavior" that specifically pertained to the 2024 US Presidential election, and Meta suspects was primarily conducted via AI.
- notahacker 3y agoThe operationalized question seems to be more of a bet on what Meta admits happens on its platform than what happens! We know that people aiming to influence the elections use bots to inflate particular sentiments, statistical techniques which are arguably 'AI' to target messaging and have the capability to effortlessly generate varations on content using LLMs... it'd almost be odd if people didn't do so in a coordinated manner for the US election.
- croddin 3y agoIt was fake images not fake voices, but yeah looks like it has already happened, not sure if it fully meets the criteria in the market. https://www.npr.org/2023/06/08/1181097435/desantis-campaign-shares-apparent-ai-generated-fake-images-of-trump-and-fauci https://www.npr.org/2023/06/08/1181097435/desantis-campaign-...
- floundy 3y agoWhere's the poll option for "it continues to be overhyped junk spewing misinformation, then arguing with the user (Bard) or acquiescing when pressed regardless of the correctness of the rebuttal (ChatGPT)"? You can surely get a indistinguishable imitation of human text from including things like Reddit comments in the LLM training data. Correctness is a hurdle I am not convinced will be surpassed.
- avionical 3y agoIt sure seems like people are getting value from the current crop of tools: https://fortune.com/2023/06/15/nine-of-ten-developers-using-ai-coding-tools-github-survey/ https://fortune.com/2023/06/15/nine-of-ten-developers-using-...
- floundy 3y agoCool, now try it with a knowledge field that isn't code that can be tested for the proper output.
- avionical 3y agoI find it useful for a few different non-coding work tasks, and I don't think I'm unusual there.
- floundy 3y agoI write technical finance/econ articles and the only thing I've found it useful for is getting a vague outline of typical topics that might be touched on in an entry-level article about something. For example to GPT-4 I ask: >is silver a good investment? what are the considerations to take into account? Returns essentially an enumerated list of topics about supply and demand, volatility, storage considerations, and opportunity cost compared to other investments. These are very basic explanations of a sentence or two and usually correct, but too general to be of much use. I then ask: >how has the historical performance of silver compared to gold and the S&P 500 over the past 5 decades? And it provides vague history of what happened to each investment in each decade, no quantifiable data. Okay, let's ask: >Re-consider the above prompt using quantifiable data, how much would an investment of $1,000 per month adjusted for inflation into each of these investments have compared at the end of the 5 decades? Output: I apologize for the confusion, but as an AI language model, I don't have access to real-time data or the ability to perform specific calculations.
- sashank_1509 3y agoAGI by 2040 huh. I bet it won’t happen by 2100, and I’m young enough that I can look back on this at 2040 and see how wrong/ correct I was. Future me, don’t forget!
- kenjackson 3y agoDepending on who you ask, we will never have it or we have it already. We never had a perfect definition of AGI, but I feel like now the definition has become so murky to be useless.
- avionical 3y agoTrue, though clearing up some of the murkiness is part of what forecast questions like these are for, with their explicitly spelled out resolution criteria.
- sashank_1509 3y agoMy definition would AGI as an AI embodied in a human robot that can do all the physical and cognitive tasks a regular human can, for example I would assume 90% of humans can be an Uber driver, and so the AGI system should be capable of being an Uber Driver. While perhaps only 5% can be a theoretical physicist or a professional tennis player, so I wouldn’t expect my AGI to be capable of that
- shaunxcode 3y agoYeah I feel like people have turned the definition of AGI into what we previously called omnipotence.
- alach11 3y agoOP in 2040: "It's not AGI because it doesn't have a soul."
- __loam 3y agoMurky definitions help with the marketing hype.
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- Imnimo 3y agoIs there any already resolved question in which metaculus forecasters made a surprisingly accurate prediction about an AI advance?
- yunohn 3y agoAnyone can signup and vote, so I assume it tends towards the majority option tbh. Seems like obviously noisy data.
- tersh 3y agoThe Metaculus prediction weights predictors by how accurate they've been.
- yunohn 3y agoYes, but if voters are voting the majority (and probable) decision, that just continues the trend of predicting obvious outcomes. It’s not something to do with understanding domain knowledge and voting based on scientific research.
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- usaar333 3y agohttps://www.metaculus.com/questions/track-record/ https://www.metaculus.com/questions/track-record/ Only 13 resolved binary questions where you had longer prediction horizons (1+ year), the accuracy is zilch in AI category - Brier score of 0.25 which is akin to just guessing out 50% for all questions. Generally overconfident. (Other categories much better - Brier of 0.14 1 year out)
- moomoo11 3y agoHow cool would it be if we could build stuff that directly builds the society we want? Call it utopia or whatever who cares. But I wish there were other people in the game (none that I know personally at least, lots just act like accountants lol) who want to use their money to build and enable the kind of world at large, like we are playing a city builder irl. Making money is whatever but making a world is just _chefs kiss_. To use the technology available today in ways that people don’t even have to think, but it leads to good outcomes. AI seems to be one of those vectors and I hope it works out. I’m personally all in with even just LLM applications.
- zgluck 3y ago"Forecaster" here means any rando who signs up to their service and answers a question. Sometimes a large polling number does not equal a more accurate answer.
- saulmunn 3y agothis isn't quite true -- on metaculus, accounts that have a history of forecasting things well are weighted more heavily
- zgluck 3y agoSISO (Shit In, Shit Out) still applies. You guys need a high quality user base with domain knowledge, at least as a seed. There is no proof that you have that at the moment. Edit: Okay, that track record page avionical posted in a separate comment is actually a bit convincing now that I dig deeper into it. :-) I suppose that for e.g. AI/AGI a weakness could be that the estimates for most of the users have been short term (a few years at most) but the AGI estimates are 8-17 years away. Those estimates are a lot harder to do make and hence surely a lot less accurate.
- avionical 3y agoWhat would be good evidence of a high-quality user base with the relevant skills? A transparent, well-calibrated track record?
- avionical 3y agoAnyone can forecast, sure. But there's a large body of research on the accuracy of aggregated forecasts and on the ability of forecasters to become more accurate with practice. (Thinking here in particular of work by Mellers & Tetlock.) Metaculus provides a transparent track record of community forecasts here: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/track-record/ https://www.metaculus.com/questions/track-record/ It's very difficult for any one person to consistently beat the community.
- nologic01 3y agoIts depressing to go over all this ultra-shallow chit-chat that has short-circuited any intelligent discussion about the role and trajectory of information technology (let alone any more serious problem or opportunity of the current times). Talking about AI (and AGI) as if its some xenomorph lurking somewhere in silicon, waiting for its inevitable escape from its human prison. AI will not bootstrap itself with some emergent property if somebody spends gazillions of dollars and Watts to estimate petazillions of parameters. Further progress is not going to come unless some very human brain and intelligence opens up completely new algorithmic vistas. The future of AI is literally tied to the future development of human mental (mathematical) models around information, knowledge and its digital representation. If not intuitively obvious, the history of mathematical thought development is crushing evidence that it follows its own dynamic over timescales that span centuries.
- letmevoteplease 3y ago"We have to learn the bitter lesson that building in how we think we think does not work in the long run. The bitter lesson is based on the historical observations that 1) AI researchers have often tried to build knowledge into their agents, 2) this always helps in the short term, and is personally satisfying to the researcher, but 3) in the long run it plateaus and even inhibits further progress, and 4) breakthrough progress eventually arrives by an opposing approach based on scaling computation by search and learning. ... The second general point to be learned from the bitter lesson is that the actual contents of minds are tremendously, irredeemably complex; we should stop trying to find simple ways to think about the contents of minds, such as simple ways to think about space, objects, multiple agents, or symmetries. All these are part of the arbitrary, intrinsically-complex, outside world. They are not what should be built in, as their complexity is endless; instead we should build in only the meta-methods that can find and capture this arbitrary complexity. Essential to these methods is that they can find good approximations, but the search for them should be by our methods, not by us. We want AI agents that can discover like we can, not which contain what we have discovered." http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
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- falloutx 3y agoI am of the opinion that this AI/ChatGPT, or atleast the current form of it, is just another VC money shuffling business which has no long term real world consequence. Like VR and crypto, while being great technical experiment but eventually they have not reached any kind of sufficient adoption. iPhone and Bitcoin came out at basically the same time and see how many people have iPhone and how many even know about bitcoin. And yet, Crypto & VR have been VC darlings for all these years. Generally I feel all the usecases for this AI are incredibly depressing and don't give us any hope that they will make the world a better place. I can totally imagine that this AI can replace some jobs, but who really benefits from it? I certainly do not, government probably doesn't, only the big corporations. We would have more umemployment, less tax collections and overall we will end up worse than before. So why are we even investing in such a tech? Who would you be even selling stuff to if all of us are unemployed?
- matthewfelgate 3y agoI don't know what you are smoking if you think ChatGPT doesn't have real world consequence.
- falloutx 3y agoSorry, I forgot the endless amount of spam generation.