FWIW, i created a PDF of the "race" ending and fed it to Gemini 2.5 Pro, prompting about the plausibility of the described outcome. here's the full output including the thinking section: https://rentry.org/v8qtqvuu -- tl;dr, Gemini thinks the proposed timeline is unlikely. but maybe we're already being deceived ;)
AI 2027
191–200 of 641 posts
Re: AI 2027
#192Older and related article from one of the authors titled "What 2026 looks like", that is holding up very well against time. Written in mid 2021 (pre ChatGPT) https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/6Xgy6CAf2jqHhynHL/what-... //edit: remove the referral tags from URL
I think it's not holding up that well outside of predictions about AI research itself. In particular, he makes a lot of predictions about AI impact on persuasion, propaganda, the information environment, etc that have not happened.
Agree. The base claims about LLMs getting bigger, more popular, and capturing people's imagination are right. Those claims are as easy as it gets, though.
Look into the specific claims and it's not as amazing. Like the claim that models will require an entire year to train, when in reality it's on the order of weeks.
The societal claims also fall apart quickly:
> Censorship is widespread and increasing, as it has for the last decade or two. Big neural nets read posts and view memes, scanning for toxicity and hate speech and a few other things. (More things keep getting added to the list.) Someone had the bright idea of making the newsfeed recommendation algorithm gently ‘nudge’ people towards spewing less hate speech; now a component of its reward function is minimizing the probability that the user will say something worthy of censorship in the next 48 hours.
This is a common trend in rationalist and "X-risk" writers: Write a big article with mostly safe claims (LLMs will get bigger and perform better!) and a lot of hedging, then people will always see the article as primarily correct. When you extract out the easy claims and look at the specifics, it's not as impressive.
This article also shows some major signs that the author is deeply embedded in specific online bubbles, like this:
> Most of America gets their news from Twitter, Reddit, etc.
Sites like Reddit and Twitter feel like the entire universe when you're embedded in them, but when you step back and look at the numbers only a fraction of the US population are active users.
Re: AI 2027
#193> AI has started to take jobs, but has also created new ones. Yeah nah, theres a key thing missing here, the number of jobs created needs to be more than the ones it's destroyed, and they need to be better paying and happen in time. History says that actually when this happens, an entire generation is yeeted on to the streets (see powered looms, Jacquard machine, steam powered machine tools) All of that cheap labour…
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Re: AI 2027
#194Older and related article from one of the authors titled "What 2026 looks like", that is holding up very well against time. Written in mid 2021 (pre ChatGPT) https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/6Xgy6CAf2jqHhynHL/what-... //edit: remove the referral tags from URL
That's incredible how much it broadly aligns with what has happened. Especially because it was before ChatGPT.
There's a pretty good summary of how well it has held up here, by the significance of each claim:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u9Kr97di29CkMvjaj/evaluating...
Re: AI 2027
#195We know this complete fiction because of parts where "the White House considers x,y,z...", etc. - As if the White House in 2027 will be some rational actor reacting sanely to events in the real world.
Re: AI 2027
#196I worry more about the human behavior predictions than the artificial intelligence predictions:
"OpenBrain’s alignment team26 is careful enough to wonder whether these victories are deep or shallow. Does the fully-trained model have some kind of robust commitment to always being honest?"
This is a capitalist arms race. No one will move carefully.
Re: AI 2027
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you share your detailed projection of what you expect the future to look like so I can compare?
Sure 5 years: AI coding assistants are a lot better than they are now, but still can't actually replace junior engineers (at least ones that aren't shit). AI fraud is rampant, with faked audio commonplace. Some companies try replacing call centres with AI, but it doesn't really work and everyone hates it. Tesla's robotaxi won't be available, but Waymo will be in most major US cities. 10 years: AI assistants are now u…
We are going to scale up GPT4 by a factor of ~10,000 and that will result in getting an accurate summary of your daily schedule?
Re: AI 2027
#198See also Dwarkesh Patel’s interview with two of the authors of this post (Scott Alexander & Daniel Kokotajlo) that was also released today: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/scott-daniel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htOvH12T7mU
Re: AI 2027
#199From the same dilettantes who brought you the Zizians and other bizarre cults... thanks but I rather read Nostradamus
What a bad faith argument. No true AI safety scaremonger brat stabs their landlord with a katana. The rationality of these rationalists is 100% uncorrolated with the rationality of *those* rationalists.
Re: AI 2027
#200> "OpenBrain (the leading US AI project) builds AI agents that are good enough to dramatically accelerate their research. The humans, who up until very recently had been the best AI researchers on the planet, sit back and watch the AIs do their jobs, making better and better AI systems." I'm not sure what gives the authors the confidence to predict such statements. Wishful thinking? Worst-case paranoia? I agree that…
It's my belief (and I'm far from the only person who thinks this) that many AI optimists are motivated by an essentially religious belief that you could call Singularitarianism. So "wishful thinking" would be one answer. This document would then be the rough equivalent of a Christian fundamentalist outlining, on the basis of tangentially related news stories, how the Second Coming will come to pass in the next few ye…
Crackpot millenarians have always been a thing. This crop of them is just particularly lame and hellbent on boiling the oceans to get their eschatological outcome.