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AI doom from an LLM-plateau-ist perspective
Andy_McKenzie10

Thanks! I agree with you about all sorts of AI alignment essays being interesting and seemingly useful. My question was more about how to measure the net rate of AI safety research progress. But I agree with you that an/your expert inside view of how insights are accumulating is a reasonable metric. I also agree with you that the acceptance of TAI x-risk in the ML community as a real thing is useful and that - while I am slightly worried about the risk of overshooting, like Scott Alexander describes - this situation seems to be generally improving. 

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4Steve Byrnes
Oh, I somehow missed that your original question was about takeoff speeds. When you wrote “algorithmic insights…will lead to dramatically faster AI development”, I misread it as “algorithmic insights…will lead to dramatically more powerful AIs”. Oops. Anyway, takeoff speeds are off-topic for this post, so I won’t comment on them, sorry. :)
0sanxiyn
I would not describe development of deep learning as discontinuous, but I would describe it as fast. As far as I can tell, development of deep learning happened by accumulation of many small improvements over time, sometimes humorously described as graduate student descent (better initialization, better activation function, better optimizer, better architecture, better regularization, etc.). It seems possible or even probable that brain-inspired RL could follow the similar trajectory once it took off, absent interventions like changes to open publishing norm.
AI doom from an LLM-plateau-ist perspective
Andy_McKenzie2-2

Good essay! Two questions if you have a moment: 

1. Can you flesh out your view of how the community is making "slow but steady progress right now on getting ready"? In my view, much of the AI safety community seems to be doing things that have unclear safety value to me, like (a) coordinating a pause in model training that seems likely to me to make things less safe if implemented (because of leading to algorithmic and hardware overhangs) or (b) converting to capabilities work (quite common, seems like an occupational hazard for someone with initially... (read more)

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Steve Byrnes*56

Can you flesh out your view of how the community is making "slow but steady progress right now on getting ready"?

  • I finished writing this less than a year ago, and it seems to be meaningfully impacting a number of people’s thinking, hopefully for the better. I personally feel strongly like I’m making progress on a worthwhile project and would like lots more time to carry it through, and if it doesn’t work out I have others in the pipeline. I continue to have ideas at a regular clip that I think are both important and obvious-in-hindsight, and to notice new
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