As you know, I’m a techno-optimist. I particularly love AI and have huge hopes that it will dramatically improve our lives. But I am also concerned about its risks, especially:
- Will it kill us all?
- Will there be a dramatic transition where lots of people lose their jobs?
- If any of the above are true, how fast will it take over?
This is important enough to deserve its own update every quarter. Here we go.
Why I Think We Will Reach AGI Soon
“AGI by 2027 is strikingly plausible. GPT-2 to GPT-4 took us from ~preschooler to ~smart high-schooler abilities in 4 years. We should expect another preschooler-to-high-schooler-sized qualitative jump by 2027.” – Leopold Aschenbrenner.
In How Fast Will AI Automation Arrive?, I explained why I think AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is imminent. The gist of the idea is that intelligence depends on:
- Investment
- Processing power
- Quality of algorithms
- Data
Are all of these growing in a way that the singularity will arrive soon?
1. Investment
Now we have plenty of it. We used to need millions to train a model. Then hundreds of millions. Then billions. Then tens of billions. Now trillions. Investors see the opportunity, and they’re willing to put in the money we need.
2. Processing Power
Processing power is always a constraint, but it has doubled every two years for over 120 years, and it doesn’t look like it will slow down, so we can assume it will continue.
This is a zoom in on computing for the last few years in AI (logarithmic scale):
