Helen Toner

Beliefs Korrents

• Korrents What they believe 12 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.

  Each is a korrent — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.

  Recent

  • The term AGI has stopped being useful: today's best systems already meet some people's definitions of it while falling far short of others'.

    Today’s best AI systems are good enough that they’re now inside the fuzzy conceptual cloud of “AGI-ish”: that is, they’ve surpassed some people’s definitions of AGI, while falling well short of others’.

    The term “AGI” is almost useless at this point Said 6 Apr 2026

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    AGI

  • AI capabilities are jagged rather than smooth, so the different definitions of human-level AI will be met years apart rather than together.

    This makes it likely that there could be big gaps between when different definitions of AGI are fulfilled.

    The term “AGI” is almost useless at this point Said 6 Apr 2026

    Full record — everyone who holds this →

    AGI

  • Any given AI capability becomes cheap and widely available within a couple of years of first being reached, so nobody can be kept away from it for long.

    But with AI, it’s different: it’s often only a couple of years between when you need a world-class computing cluster to do something and when you can run it on a high-end gaming chip on your laptop.

    Nonproliferation is the wrong approach to AI misuse Said 5 Apr 2025

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  Show 9 more

  • Nonproliferation is the wrong frame for AI misuse; the workable strategy is to use the gap before a capability spreads to build defences against it.

    We should think of the gap between frontier models and proliferated models as an adaptation buffer: a limited time window when we know what bad actors will soon be able to use AI for, which gives us a chance to implement defensive measures that increase society’s resilience to the danger.

    Nonproliferation is the wrong approach to AI misuse Said 5 Apr 2025

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  • Delaying the open release of a new capability by months or years is worth doing, even though preventing its spread indefinitely is not.

    The current status quo—where new models that push the frontier are kept private, and openly available equivalents are only released after a lag of months or years—is valuable.

    Nonproliferation is the wrong approach to AI misuse Said 5 Apr 2025

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  • Adapting over time is a workable answer to humans misusing AI and no answer at all to losing control of systems smarter than us.

    But we do not have experience with the kinds of problems we’ll face if we build machines that are smarter and more capable than us, so I feel much less sanguine that an adaptation-based strategy will help us there.

    Nonproliferation is the wrong approach to AI misuse Said 5 Apr 2025

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  • Advocates who argue for restricting AI on misuse grounds while privately fearing takeover end up less credible than if they said what they meant.

    By trying to use misuse as a fig leaf for their real concerns, they end up sounding much less credible than if they just tried to argue for what they actually meant.

    Nonproliferation is the wrong approach to AI misuse Said 5 Apr 2025

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  • The core of the alignment problem is steerability — whether an AI can be reliably steered anywhere at all — which is a different question from whose values it is steered towards.

    I see this as a totally fair question that totally misses the point of what “alignment” was trying to refer to: whether we’d be able to reliably steer advanced systems towards anything at all.

    The core challenge of AI alignment is “steerability” Said 3 Apr 2025

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    AI alignment

  • Nobody has built a model that resists targeted jailbreaking, so the ability of AI companies to steer their own models is still limited.

    But no one has (yet) been able to develop a model that is resistant to targeted “jailbreaking” that evades these restrictions.

    The core challenge of AI alignment is “steerability” Said 3 Apr 2025

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  • Dismissing human-level AI as science fiction is now unserious, because even the sceptical experts put it within a decade or two.

    Dismissing discussion of AGI, human-level AI, transformative AI, superintelligence, etc. as “science fiction” should be seen as a sign of total unseriousness.

    "Long" timelines to advanced AI have gotten crazy short Said 1 Apr 2025

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    AGIAI alignment

  • Arguing that human-level AI is very unlikely within twenty years is now the minority position, and the burden of proof has moved onto it.

    If you want to argue that human-level AI is extremely unlikely in the next 20 years, you certainly can, but you should treat that as a minority position where the burden of proof is on you.

    "Long" timelines to advanced AI have gotten crazy short Said 1 Apr 2025

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  • Advanced AI is close enough that the preparations which take years have to be started now, whichever end of the expert range you believe.

    We need to leap into action on many of the same things that could help if it does turn out that we only have a few years.

    "Long" timelines to advanced AI have gotten crazy short Said 1 Apr 2025

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  Beliefs others hold too

  • Any given AI capability becomes cheap and widely available within a couple of years of first being reached, so nobody can be kept away from it for long. 3 hold this

    But with AI, it’s different: it’s often only a couple of years between when you need a world-class computing cluster to do something and when you can run it on a high-end gaming chip on your laptop.

    Nonproliferation is the wrong approach to AI misuse Said 5 Apr 2025

    Full record — everyone who holds this →

  • Advanced AI is close enough that the preparations which take years have to be started now, whichever end of the expert range you believe. 2 hold this

    We need to leap into action on many of the same things that could help if it does turn out that we only have a few years.

    "Long" timelines to advanced AI have gotten crazy short Said 1 Apr 2025

    Full record — everyone who holds this →

  All 12 beliefs →