Nathan Lambert: prediction

Transcript context

…So we’re doing a depth-first search here on topics, taking tangent of a tangent, so let’s continue on that depth-first search. You said that you’re both feeling the AGI. What’s your timeline? Dario is 2026 for the super powerful AI that’s basically agentic to a degree where it’s a real security threat, that level of AGI. What’s your timeline? I don’t like to attribute specific abilities because predicting specific abilities and when is very hard. I think mostly if you’re going to say that I’m feeling the AGI is that I expect continued, rapid, surprising progress over the next few years. So, something like R1 is less surprising to me from DeepSeek because I expect there to be new paradigms versus … … surprising to me from DeepSeek because I expect there to be new paradigms where substantial progress can be made. I think DeepSeek-R1 is so unsettling because we’re kind of on this path with ChatGPT. It’s like it’s getting better, it’s getting better, it’s getting better, and then we have a new direction for changing the models, and we took one step like this and we took a step-up. So it looks like a really fast slope, and then we’re going to just take more steps. So it’s just really unsettling when you have these big steps, and I expect that to keep happening. I’ve tried opening Operator, I’ve tried Claude computer use, they’re not there yet. I understand the idea, but it’s just so hard to predict what is the breakthrough that’ll make something like that work. And I think it’s more likely that we have breakthroughs that work in things that we don’t know what they’re going to do. So everyone wants agents. Dario has a very eloquent way of describing this, and I just think that it’s like there’s going to be more than that, so just expect these things to come. I’m going to have to try to pin you down to a date on the AGI timeline. Like the nuclear weapon moment, so moment where on the geopolitical stage, there’s a real… Because we’re talking about export controls, when do you think, just even to throw out a date, when do you think that would be? For me, it’s probably after 2030, so I’m not as-…

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