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AI 2040: Plan A

ai-2040.com

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Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#511

Post by nadir_ishiguro »

nradov wrote: post #478
fwipsy wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't confuse AI researchers and AI safety researchers (although there is some overlap.) That's like confusing the people from the Manhattan project with the people who protested 3 Mile Island, because they're both focused on nuclear technology. One effect of EA is that every AI researcher says they're trying to make the world better. Some of them are full of shit, but not all. I'm fairly certain the authors w…

Right, the so-called "AI safety researchers" are worthless clowns and grifters with nothing of value to contribute. We would all be better off if they spent their time on something productive like writing entertaining sci-fi stories. They certainly seem to have the rich imagination necessary for that occupation.

Sadly they're very bad writers. Have you actually read the stuff they produced? Horrible. Yudkosky himself wrote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_o...

It's so bad

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#512

Post by nadir_ishiguro »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #446
romanhounds wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I intend to donate (at least) 20% of my lifetime income to effective charities. I publish my donations on my Donations page. From your bio I suspect you're already in the cult.

"I see your objection to ad hominem arguments, and raise you a further ad hominem argument"

His whole blog is exactly the same kind of nonsense as the article and reeks of effective altruism.

That's not an ad hominem.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#513

Post by nadir_ishiguro »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #425
romanhounds wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I intend to donate (at least) 20% of my lifetime income to effective charities. I publish my donations on my Donations page. From your bio I suspect you're already in the cult.

Imagine thinking someone donating money is evidence of something bad

If the cause they donate to is bad, it is

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#514

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

nadir_ishiguro wrote: post #512
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I see your objection to ad hominem arguments, and raise you a further ad hominem argument"

His whole blog is exactly the same kind of nonsense as the article and reeks of effective altruism. That's not an ad hominem.

Attacking a person instead of the substance of what they're saying is ad hominem.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#515

Post by Diogenesian »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #450
monegator wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to me this article feels like an exercise in creative writing rather because it is. Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43571851 / https://ai-2027.com/

Hasn't the AI 2027 "creative writing exercise" held up not-so-bad thus far?

This incredibly critical part of "early 2026" doesn't seem to hold up very well:

  Overall, they are making algorithmic progress 50% faster than they would without AI assistants
Yes the AI labs are using LLM-assisted development, but I am not aware of LLM-assisted research into better deep learning algorithms. "50% faster algorithmic progress" is a strange thing to predict about neural networks: historically it seems like algorithmic progress is very infrequent, and tends to be disruptive across the field. Likewise with the underlying algorithms in Codex and Claude Code - they aren't that sophisticated in the first place, and vibe coding an implementation 50% fasfer doesn't count as AI-assisted algorithmic progress. Maybe they mean cost?

And ironically they didn't predict the actual 2026 reality that Mythos sucks as an agent but commanded global attention as a cybersecurity tool.

Also this just seems childish and clearly hasn't really panned out:

  But China is falling behind on AI algorithms due to their weaker models. The Chinese intelligence agencies—among the best in the world—double down on their plans to steal OpenBrain’s weights.
China has the exact same "algorithms"! The "algorithms" are on arXiv and the specific architectures are typically public. What China lacks is compute, and the US labs had a big head start on training data + RLHF.

The article hinges on AI automating R&D and finding something fundamentally more powerful and reliable than the current transformer LLMs. But that hasn't panned out at all. What has panned out is better scaffolding around running the LLMs in an iterative loop.

It actually seems to me AI 2027 holds up badly, unless your only takeaway is "AI gets better."

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#516

Post by reasonableklout »

bwanab wrote: post #456
taurath wrote: post #267

This is religious fervor folks, as AI 2027 was. I grew up in evangelical christianity, and to them the end of the world is just around the corner, the same way it has been since I was a small child and likely will be when we are all gone. This isn't science. This isn't hypothesis experiment record results. This is very expensive astrology, shiny rock collecting, ritualistic meaning-making and self-justification. Yall…

The other thing about this article is that it contains falsifiable claims that are, well, false. Consider the following direct quote: "The 2028 election cycle is heated, as usual. AI is the biggest topic." No poll of the American public has AI as one of the top concerns except in polls where the question is specifically about AI. The general polls show topics like healthcare costs, inflation/affordability, government…

AI is not yet a top 5 concern for the American public, but polls show that it is for DC staffers: https://x.com/TimSchnabel/status/2072725548405518574

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#517

Post by 27183 »

nadir_ishiguro wrote: post #510
stalfie wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one knows how LLMs work. We know how the architecture works, but almost nothing about why. Saying "statistical next token prediction" tells you about as much about LLMs as saying "action potential thresholds" tells you about the brain. A true fact that explains very little. And I'm sorry, but you're not up to date about interpretability literature, or for that matter philosophical discourse, if you think you have…

"And I'm sorry, but you're not up to date about interpretability literature, or for that matter philosophical discourse," I see no citations referring to the current philsophical discourse, unless you mean to imply anthropic's paid people are to be considered to be part of that. That they "see structures in Claude akin to those we think are associated with human consciousnesses experience in the brain" is if anything…

+1 I can't imagine how any corporate entity could be credible in this financial environment. Nothing they say can be reliably considered as anything but marketing copy. This situation is exactly what academic publishing is for. Although that institution has also been degrading.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#518

Post by gcr »

derektank wrote: post #500
mekael wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a society we already know how to make the lives of everyone better: 1. Stable housing 2. Access to safe drinking water 3. Access to food 4. Access to healthcare 5. Access to education 6. Stable governments The EA community has so many "ideas" about what would help, when all they need to do is focus on those six and the world would be as close to a utopia as you or I could hope to see in our lifetimes. I legitimate…

There are tradeoffs to make between those six items. Money spent on stable housing is money not spent on safe drinking water is money not spent on education. There is a limited amount of money spent on charitable giving every year, and we obviously cannot afford to provide all of those things to everyone with the funds currently available. If you’re arguing that people should simply be donating more money, I (and I t…

I agree with your last sentence, but we can’t partition the budget up so cleanly though. Societal spending is interdependent and additive across domains. Spending on cheap access to safe water or food reduces healthcare costs. Spending heavily on education tends to strengthen government in the long run, and better-run governments amplify efforts to improve housing/food/water/.

The one exception is AI. Historically, redirecting charitable funds towards AI safety tends to starve or undo the rest of these efforts, which is why I’m so disappointed by many EA institutions dropping other initiatives to put their eggs in the AGI basket.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#519

Post by reasonableklout »

romanhounds wrote: post #383
fwipsy wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember thinking exactly the same thing around 5-7 years ago, in the GPT-2/GPT-3 era. "Oh sure they can produce semi-coherent output, but truly intelligent behavior is still far away. This isn't science fiction, they're just falling prey to Pascal's Mugging same as my religious friends did." Now I'm not so sure. I give the AI safety subculture as a whole a lot of credit for putting it on my radar back when it was…

>Given that you apparently share their goals (a better world,) isn't it worth at least hearing them out on their methods? Their methods are about convincing others that things that enrich and empower themselves at the expense of others is "improving the world". This isn't the stance of serious people who want to improve the world.

I'm confused, the authors of the website are arguing that the development of AI should be slowed down so that society can adapt. What do you think they are trying to convince others of?

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#520

Post by fwipsy »

nradov wrote: post #478
fwipsy wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't confuse AI researchers and AI safety researchers (although there is some overlap.) That's like confusing the people from the Manhattan project with the people who protested 3 Mile Island, because they're both focused on nuclear technology. One effect of EA is that every AI researcher says they're trying to make the world better. Some of them are full of shit, but not all. I'm fairly certain the authors w…

Right, the so-called "AI safety researchers" are worthless clowns and grifters with nothing of value to contribute. We would all be better off if they spent their time on something productive like writing entertaining sci-fi stories. They certainly seem to have the rich imagination necessary for that occupation.

Now this is an unserious comment, just throwing insults without explaining your reasoning at all. Do you believe that AI itself is worthless? Or that it's just incapable of causing harm? Do you resent the safeguards placed on AI because they are personally inconvenient to you? When introducing a new technology at this scale, don't you think it's worth looking before leaping?
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