There's obviously intelligence under some definitions. It meets a weak definition of AGI since it reasons about a lot of things almost as well as the average human.

And yes, I know how it works and what its limitations are. It's not that useful yet, but discounting it entirely is as silly as thinking it's the AGI we're looking for.

The thing about chatGPT is that everyone talked about it and tried it. I and most ML folks hadn't tried GPT3

Everyone I know of was pretty shocked at how good GPT3 is. It did change timelines in the folks I know of, including the ones that think about timelines a lot as part of their jobs.

A lot of people who think about this a lot think it does. LLMs seem like they may play an important role in creating genuine general intelligence. But of course they would need many additions.

Yes; but there's a general agreement that tool AI is vastly less dangerous than agentic AI. This seems to be the crux of disagreement between those who think risk is very high or just moderately high.

Many thousands of human hours are cheap to buy, and cycles get cheaper every year. So those things aren't really constraints except currently for small businesses.

ML researchers worry a lot less than AGI safety people. I think that's because only the AGI safety people spend a lot of time thinking about getting all the way to agentic superhuman intelligence.

If we're building tools, not much need to worry.

If we're building beings with goals, smarter than ourselves, time to worry.

Now: do you think we'll all stop with tools? Or go on to build cool agents that think and act for themselves?

Wow. I just don't get it.

This was done before chatGPT and most people hadn't used gpt 3 before that.

Sorry; my implication was that Asimov introduced the topic but wasn't particularly compelling. Yudkowsky created the first institute and garnered the first funding. But of course credit should be broadly shared.

Asimov's rules don't work, and many of the stories were actually about that. But they also don't include civilization ending mistakes. The movie I Robot actually did a great job updating that premise, I think.

One counterintuitive thing is that people in the field of AI are way harder to convince than civilians. They have a vested interest in research moving ahead full speed.

As for your bs detector, I'm don't know what to say. And I'm not linking this account to my real identity. You can believe me or not.

If you're skeptical that such a field exists, you can look at the Alignment Forum as the principle place that we publish.

Well, I'm now a professional in the field of AGI safety. Not sure how you can document influence. I'd say most of my colleagues would agree with that. Not that it wouldn't have happened without him but might've taken many more years to ramp up the same amount.

Good point, but those didn't convince anyone to take it seriously because they didn't have compelling arguments. Yudkowsky did.

Founding a field is a bit of a rare thing

Well, he's the father of a whole field that might determine the future of humanity. It would be tough to keep it cool the 1009th time you've seen the same poorly thought out dismissal of the whole thing. If I were in his shoes I might be even crankier.

It's probably mostly a side effect of being able to simulate possible futures. This helps in planning and selecting actions based on likely outcomes several steps away.

And yes, that is also crucial for how we experience our consciousness.

He's the direct father of the whole AGI safety field. I got interested after reading an article by him in maybe 2004. Bostrom credits him with many of the ideas in Superintelligence, including the core logic about alignment being necessary for human survival.

Now he's among the least optimistic. And he's not necessarily wrong.

He could be a little nicer and more optimistic about others' intelligence.

I think slightly douchy is more fair. I've read a ton of his stuff and only a subset is offensive to anyone. But yeah, he's not as considerate as he probably should be.

Yeah. But if we get it wrong, we're all dead. So we have to try.

Good sociopolitical breakdown.

But biases aren't the whole story - there's a lot of logic in play. And way more of it is deployed on one side than the other...

I'm pretty deep into this field. I have published in the field, and have followed it almost since it started with Yudkowsky.

I believe they both have strong arguments. Or rather, those who share Altmann's cautious-but-optimistic view have strong arguments.

But both arguments are based on how AGI will be built. And we simply don't know that. So we can't accurately guess our odds.

But it's for sure that working hard on this problem will improve our odds of a really good future over disaster.

This is an excellent point. Many of us are probably underestimating timelines based on a desire to believe. Motivated reasoning and confirmation bias are huge influences.

You probably shouldn't have mixed it with an argument for longer timelines. That will give an excuse to argue that and ig ore the point.

The reasonable estimate is very wide. Nobody knows how easy or hard it might be to create AGI. I've looked at all of the arguments, and have enough expertise to understand them. Nobody knows.

I mean yeah

You can definitely predict some things outside of five years with good accuracy. Look at Moore's Law. That's way more accurate than predictions need to be to be useful. Sure if nukes were exchanged all bets are off, but outside of that I just disagree with your statement. For instance: will China's gender imbalance cause them trouble in ten years? It almost certainly will.

I respectfully am going with the opinions of those who have studied the effects of fallout and nuclear winter.

Yes we could have a large war without a nuclear exchange. That does not seem likely.

Ww3 will most certainly end civilization, if not the entire species. Experts are unsure whether a full scale nuclear exchange would kill every single human being, but certainly the vast majority.

Nukes