Dario Amodei: prediction

Transcript context

…I think the framework you’re laying down obviously makes sense. We’re making progress toward AGI. Nobody at this point disagrees we’re going to achieve AGI this century. The crux is you say we’re hitting the end of the exponential. Somebody else looks at this and says, “We’ve been making progress since 2012, and by 2035 we’ll have a human-like agent.” Obviously we’re seeing in these models the kinds of things that evolution did, or that learning within a human lifetime does. I want to understand what you’re seeing that makes you think it’s one year away and not ten years away. There are two claims you could make here, one stronger and one weaker. Starting with the weaker claim, when I first saw the scaling back in 2019, I wasn’t sure. This was a 50/50 thing. I thought I saw something. My claim was that this was much more likely than anyone thinks. Maybe there’s a 50% chance this happens. On the basic hypothesis of, as you put it, within ten years we’ll get to what I call a “country of geniuses in a data center”, I’m at 90% on that. It’s hard to go much higher than 90% because the world is so unpredictable. Maybe the irreducible uncertainty puts us at 95%, where you get to things like multiple companies having internal turmoil, Taiwan gets invaded, all the fabs get blown up by missiles. Now you’ve jinxed us, Dario.…

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