Dwarkesh Patel: prediction

Transcript context

…Actually making it work. When you’re talking about an agent, or what the labs have in mind and maybe what I have in mind as well, you should think of it almost like an employee or an intern that you would hire to work with you. For example, you work with some employees here. When would you prefer to have an agent like Claude or Codex do that work? Currently, of course they can’t. What would it take for them to be able to do that? Why don’t you do it today? The reason you don’t do it today is because they just don’t work. They don’t have enough intelligence, they’re not multimodal enough, they can’t do computer use and all this stuff. They don’t do a lot of the things you’ve alluded to earlier. They don’t have continual learning. You can’t just tell them something and they’ll remember it. They’re cognitively lacking and it’s just not working. It will take about a decade to work through all of those issues. Interesting. As a professional podcaster and a viewer of AI from afar, it’s easy for me to identify what’s lacking: continual learning is lacking, or multimodality is lacking. But I don’t really have a good way of trying to put a timeline on it. If somebody asks how long continual learning will take, I have no prior about whether this is a project that should take 5 years, 10 years, or 50 years. Why a decade? Why not one year? Why not 50 years? This is where you get into a bit of my own intuition, and doing a bit of an extrapolation with respect to my own experience in the field. I’ve been in AI for almost two decades. It’s going to be 15 years or so, not that long. You had Richard Sutton here, who was around for much longer. I do have about 15 years of experience of people making predictions, of seeing how they turned out. Also I was in the industry for a while, I was in research, and I’ve worked in the industry for a while. I have a general intuition that I have left from that. I feel like the problems are tractable, they’re surmountable, but they’re still difficult. If I just average it out, it just feels like a decade to me.…

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