Dean Ball: prediction

Transcript context

…So I guess, how do you understand what the safety plan is? How do you understand, like, how, how committed the companies are to kind of an RSI or bust? You know, OpenAI famously has public timelines for when they wanna have the automated intern and the full-fledged ML researcher. So yeah, what do, what do you, how do you understand the plan, and do you think it is, uh, anywhere close to being up to the task at this point? Well, one thing I wanna say, when I, when I was, I was, I was talking about competition specifically with respect to like, um, like what I will be doing, which is to say like, like, you know, our... The goal of my team will not just be, like the goal of my team will be to have like really, really fantastic intellectual output. That is like, wow, this team, if it were like not part of OpenAI and it were just like its own like little think tank, it would be like one of the most interesting think tanks in the whole country, right? And like everyone would be paying attention to it, right? Like I actually just want it to be like a really superb team that is producing, um, you know, policy and sort of public interest related work, um, that is, that is as good as anything else that, that, you know, any of our, any of OpenAI's competitors put out. That's what I meant by competition, to be clear. And I think there is a good example of straightforwardly healthy competition. When it comes to RSI, I think, yeah, I think there's certainly a lot of unknowns here. I, I put, my base case for what RSI means, at least in the earlier innings, is something to the effect of, one thing, it's like RSI, recursive self-improvement is a part of every technology. Every general purpose technology has some aspect of recursion to it, by the very nature of generality, right? General purpose means one of the purposes to which it can be applied is itself, right? So in some ways, I don't see recursive self-improvement as some big break from the history of technology. I see it as being actually like it would be surprising if there weren't recursive self-improvement in AI, right? I also think, like we've been doing recursive self-improvement in this field for a long time, and some people imagine a Things is, there's gonna be some big break moment where you could argue really since GPT-4, we've been using the models to make the models better since at least GPT-4. And I'm sure that if you actually went back and looked through the history of machine learning even more, I bet you that actually goes back even further than that. So some people imagine there being this sharp discontinuous jump in terms of what RSI means. And I certainly think that is plausible, but I don't... I'm a little s- it's not my prior, because your prior should just generally be that there is alwa- I'm sure on this podcast I've said before, that there is always more continuity than discontinuity. This is always the case. Um, and so your prior should be, like, against a massive discontinuous leap. It is plausible, and so I think step number one, and I can't, I can't... I'm not in yet, so I don't actually know because I haven't looked at the roadmap yet. But step number one would be to try to really measure twice and cut once, and figure out what we think this might mean. ot in yet, so I don't actually know because I haven't looked at the roadmap yet. But step number one would be to try to really measure twice and cut once, and figure out what we think this might mean. Tr- really try to refine the probabilities there, at least in my own mind, of are we talking about a discontinuous leap that happens very soon, or are we talking about something that actually is smoother in some way? Then I think if we are in... I think the chances of discontinuous leap are high enough no matter what, that you need to be planning now, even if your, even if your credence that it happens is 20% or 10%. That's high enough that you should be making plans now for what you wanna do.…

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