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Published · transcript-backed

Paul Christiano: uncertainty

31 Oct 2023 Dwarkesh Podcast Paul Christiano — Preventing an AI takeover

“You could ask what’s the shortest program, which if you run it on a million h 100s connected in a nice network with a hospitable environment will eventually go to the stars. But that seems like it’s probably on the order of tens of thousands of bytes or I don’t know if I had to guess the median, I’d guess 10,000 bytes.”

— Paul Christiano

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Paul Christiano
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
uncertainty
Recorded
31 Oct 2023
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

Transcript context

…How big do you think a seed AI would be? What is the minimum sort of encoding of something that is as smart as a human? I think it depends a lot what substrate it gets to run on. So if you tell me how much computation does it get before or what kind of real world infrastructure does it get? You could ask what’s the shortest program, which if you run it on a million h 100s connected in a nice network with a hospitable environment will eventually go to the stars. But that seems like it’s probably on the order of tens of thousands of bytes or I don’t know if I had to guess the median, I’d guess 10,000 bytes. Wait, the specification or the compression of just the program?…

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