Shane Legg: belief

Transcript context

…Where do you think AI progress itself would have been without DeepMind? This is not just a point that people make about DeepMind. I think this is a general point people make about OpenAI and Anthropic as well, that these people went into the business to accelerate safety and the net effect might have been to accelerate capabilities far more. Right, right. I think we have accelerated capabilities, but again, the counterfactuals are quite difficult. We didn't do ImageNet, for example, and ImageNet was very influential in attracting investment to the field. We did do AlphaGo, and that changed some people's minds. But, the community is a lot bigger than just DeepMind. If you went back more than five years in the future, we were able to do bigger projects with bigger teams and take on more ambitious things than a lot of the smaller academic groups, right? And so the sort of nature of the type of work we could do was a bit different. And that affected the dynamics in some ways. But, the community is much, much bigger than DeepMind. There are a number of other players with significant resources. Maybe we've sped things up a bit, but I think a lot of these things would have happened before too long anyway. Often good ideas are in the air, and as a researcher, when you're about to publish something, you see somebody else has got a very similar idea coming out with some good results. Often it's kind of like the time is right for things. So I find it very hard to reason about the counterfactuals there. Speaking of the early years, it's really interesting that in 2011, you had a blog post where you said — “I’ve decided to once again leave my prediction for when human level AGI will arrive unchanged. That is, I give it a log-normal distribution with a mean of 2028 and a mode of 2025, under the assumption that nothing crazy happens like a nuclear war.” This is before deep learning, this is when nobody's talking about AI, and it turns out that if the trends continue, this is not an unreasonable prediction. How did you have that accurate of an estimate before all these trends came into effect?…

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