Eliezer Yudkowsky: belief

Transcript context

…What is the thing where we can sort of establish your track record before everybody falls over dead? It’s hard. It is just easier to predict the endpoint than it is to predict the path. Some people will claim that I’ve done poorly compared to others who tried to predict things. I would dispute this. I think that the Hanson-Yudkowsky foom debate was won by Gwern Branwen, but I do think that Gwern Branwen is well to the Yudkowsky side of Yudkowsky in the original foom debate. Roughly, Hansen was like — you’re going to have all these distinct handcrafted systems that incorporate lots of human knowledge specialized for particular domains. Handcrafted to incorporate human knowledge, not just run on giant data sets. I was like — you’re going to have a carefully crafted architecture with a bunch of subsystems and that thing is going to look at the data and not be handcrafted to the particular features of the data. It’s going to learn the data. Then the actual thing is like — Ha ha. You don’t have this handcrafted system that learns, you just stack more layers. So like, Hanson here, Yudkowsky here, reality there. This would be my interpretation of what happened in the past. And if you want to be like — Well, who did better than that? It’s people like Shane Legg and Gwern Branwen. If you look at the whole planet, you can find somebody who made better predictions than Eliezer Yudkowsky, that’s for sure. Are these people currently telling you that you’re safe? No, they are not. The broader question I have is there’s been huge amounts of updates in the last 10-20 years. We’ve had the deep learning revolution. We’ve had the success of LLMs. It seems odd that none of this information has changed the basic picture that was clear to you like 15-20 years ago.…

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