Dario Amodei: belief

Transcript context

…Now you’ve jinxed us, Dario. You could construct a 5% world where things get delayed for ten years. There’s another 5% which is that I’m very confident on tasks that can be verified. With coding, except for that irreducible uncertainty, I think we’ll be there in one or two years. There’s no way we will not be there in ten years in terms of being able to do end-to-end coding. My one little bit of fundamental uncertainty, even on long timescales, is about tasks that aren’t verifiable: planning a mission to Mars; doing some fundamental scientific discovery like CRISPR; writing a novel. It’s hard to verify those tasks. I am almost certain we have a reliable path to get there, but if there’s a little bit of uncertainty it’s there. On the ten-year timeline I’m at 90%, which is about as certain as you can be. I think it’s crazy to say that this won’t happen by 2035. In some sane world, it would be outside the mainstream. But the emphasis on verification hints to me a lack of belief that these models are generalized. If you think about humans, we’re both good at things for which we get verifiable reward and things for which we don’t.…

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