Paul Christiano: prediction

Transcript context

…And what would be the piece of evidence that would nudge you one way or another, where you look at that and be like, oh fuck, this is at 20% by 2040 or 60% by 2040 or something. Is there something that could happen in the next few years or next 3 years? What is the thing you're looking to where this will be a big update for you? Again, I think there's some just how capable is each model where I think we're really bad at extrapolating. We still have some subjective guess and you're comparing it to what happened and that will move me. Every time we see what happens with another order of magnitude of training compute, I will have a slightly different guess for where things are going. These probabilities are coarse enough that, again, I don't know if that 40% is real or if like post GBG 3.5 and four, I should be at like 60% or what. That's one thing. And the second thing is just like some if there was some ability to extrapolate, I think this could reduce error bars a lot. I think here's another way you could try and do an extrapolation is you could just say how much economic value do systems produce and how fast is that growing? I think once you have systems actually doing jobs, the extrapolation gets easier because you're not moving from a subjective impression of a chat to automating all R and D, you're moving from automating this job to automating that job or whatever. Unfortunately, that's like probably by the time you have nice trends from that, you're not talking about 2040, you're talking about two years from the end of days or one year from the end of days or whatever. But to the extent that you can get extrapolations like that, I do think it can provide more clarity. But why is economic value the thing we would want to extrapolate? Because, for example, you started off with chimps and they're just getting gradually smarter to human level. They would basically provide no economic value until they were basically worth as much as a human. So it would be this very gradual and then very fast increase in their value. So is the increase in value from GBD four, GBD five, GBD six? Is that the extrapolation we want?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.