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"Through A Glass Darkly" In Asterisk Magazine

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“Through A Glass Darkly” In Asterisk Magazine

I have an article summarizing attempts to forecast AI progress, including a five year check-in on the predictions in Grace et al (2017) . It’s not here, it’s at asteriskmag.com , a rationalist / effective altruist magazine: Through A Glass Darkly . This is their AI issue (it’s not always so AI focused).

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I have an article summarizing attempts to forecast AI progress, including a five year check-in on the predictions in Grace et al (2017) . It’s not here, it’s at asteriskmag.com , a rationalist / effective altruist magazine: Through A Glass Darkly . This is their AI issue (it’s not always so AI focused). Other stories include: - Crash Testing GPT-4 : Before releasing GPT-4, OpenAI sent a preliminary version to the Alignment Research Center to test it for unsafe capabilities; the detail that made the news was how the AI managed to hire a gig worker to solve CAPTCHAs for it by pretending to be a blind person. Asterisk interviews Beth Barnes, leader of the team that ran those tests. - What We Get Wrong About AI And China : Professor Jeffrey Ding discusses the Chinese AI situation. If I’m understanding right, China is 1-2 years behind the US, but that this number underplays the size of the gap, and if the US stopped innovating today, China wouldn’t necessarily push ahead in 3 years. Today’s Marginal Revolution links included a claim that a new Chinese model beats GPT-4; I’m very skeptical and waiting to hear more. - The Transistor Cliff : Sarah Constantin on the future of microchips. Most predictions about the future of AI center around the idea that lower compute costs → bigger training runs → smarter models. But how sure are we that we can keep decreasing compute costs indefinitely? Will we reach physical limits or memory bottlenecks? What if we do? - A Debate About AI And Explosive Growth : Tamay Besiroglu vs. Matt Clancy. Will AI be just another invention that is probably good for the economy but leaves GDP trajectories overall unchanged? Or will it create a technoeconomic singularity leading to “impossibly” fast economic growth? A good followup for my recent Davidson On Takeoff Speeds . I don’t think they emphasized enough the claim that the natural trajectory of growth had long been trending towards a singularity in the 2020s, we only started deviating from that natural trajectory since ~1960 or so , and that we’re just debating whether AI will restore the natural curve rather than whether it will do some bizarre unprecedented thing that we should have a high prior against. Plus superforecaster Jonathan Mann on whether AI will take tech jobs , Kelsey Piper on the different camps within AI safety , Michael Gordin on how long until Armageddon (surprisingly not AI related!), Robert Long on what the history of debating animal intelligence tells us about AI intelligence , Avital Balwit on the technical aspects of regulating AI compute , Carl Robichaud on how we (sort of) succeeded at nuclear non-proliferation , and Jamie Wahls’ short story about chatbot romance . Congratulations again to Clara, Jake, and the rest of the Asterisk team! As always, you can subscribe here .