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Daniel Kokotajlo released the (excellent) 2021 forecast. He was then hired by OpenAI, and not at liberty to speak freely, until he quit in 2024. He's part of th
by AlphaAndOmega0 2y ago
Daniel Kokotajlo released the (excellent) 2021 forecast. He was then hired by OpenAI, and not at liberty to speak freely, until he quit in 2024. He's part of the team making this forecast.
The others include:
Eli Lifland, a superforecaster who is ranked first on RAND’s Forecasting initiative. You can read more about him and his forecasting team here. He cofounded and advises AI Digest and co-created TextAttack, an adversarial attack framework for language models.
Jonas Vollmer, a VC at Macroscopic Ventures, which has done its own, more practical form of successful AI forecasting: they made an early stage investment in Anthropic, now worth $60 billion.
Thomas Larsen, the former executive director of the Center for AI Policy, a group which advises policymakers on both sides of the aisle.
Romeo Dean, a leader of Harvard’s AI Safety Student Team and budding expert in AI hardware.
And finally, Scott Alexander himself.
- kridsdale3 2y agoTBH, this kind of reads like the pedigrees of the former members of the OpenAI board. When the thing blew up, and people started to apply real scrutiny, it turned out that about half of them had no real experience in pretty much anything at all, except founding Foundations and instituting Institutes. A lot of people (like the Effective Altruism cult) seem to have made a career out of selling their Sci-Fi content as policy advice.
- flappyeagle 2y agoc'mon man, you don't believe that, let's have a little less disingenuousness on the internet
- arduanika 2y agoHow would you know what he believes? There's hype and there's people calling bullshit. If you work from the assumption that the hype people are genuine, but the people calling bullshit can't be for real, that's how you get a bubble.
- flappyeagle 2y agoBecause they are not the same in any way. It’s not a bunch of junior academics, it’s literally including someone who worked at OpenAI
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- arduanika 2y agoI asked you how you know kridsdale3 believes X, and you're reply is basically, "because I believe Y". I hope you don't call yourself a rationalist, given that you're hazy on the meaning of "because" and struggle with theory of mind. Sure, OpenAI put up with one of these safety larpers for a few years while it was part of their brand. Reasonable people can disagree on how much that counts for. You're right it's not a bunch of junior academics. It's not even a bunch of junior academics. This stuff would never pass muster in a reputable academic peer-reviewed journal, so from an academic perspective, this is not even the JV stuff. That's why they have to found their own bizarro network of foundations and so on, to give the appearance of seriousness and legitimacy. This might fool people who aren't looking closely, but the trick does not work on real academics, nor does it work on the silent majority of those who are actually building the tech capabilities.
- MrScruff 2y agoI kind of agree - since the Bostrom book there is a cottage industry of people with non-technical backgrounds writing papers about singularity thought experiments, and it does seem to be on the spectrum with hard sci-fi writing. A lot of these people are clearly intelligent, and it's not even that I think everything they say is wrong (I made similar assumptions long ago before I'd even heard of Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity, although at the time I would have guessed 2050). It's just that they seem to believe their thought process and Bayesian logic is more rigourous than it actually is.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- superconduct123 2y agoI mean either researchers creating new models or people building products using the current models Not all these soft roles
- nice_byte 2y agothis sounds like a bunch of people who make a living _talking_ about the technology, which lends them close to 0 credibility.
- mickelsen 2y ago[dead]
- pixodaros 2y agoScott Alexander, for what its worth, is a psychiatrist, race science enthusiast, and blogger whose closest connection to software development is Bay Area house parties and a failed startup called MetaMed (2012-2015) https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/MetaMed https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/MetaMed
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Bjorkbat 2y agoMinor pet-peeve of mine, I really don't like the term "superforecaster". First time I encountered it was in association with some guy who was making predictions a year or two out. Which to be fair it actually is kind of impressive if someone can make accurate predictions about the future that far head, but only because people are really bad at predicting the future. Implicitly when I hear "superforecaster" I think they're someone that's really good at predicting the future, but deeper inspection often reveals that "the future" is constrained to the next 2 years. Beyond that they tend to be as bad as any other "futurist".