Today's free issue of The Diff: thoughts on pacing the frontier—particularly, the possibility that even a deliberately slower pace will be faster than people expect.
What we must realize is that the current preference cascade, on the need to Pace the Frontier, is insufficient. If we are to make it out of this alive, we will have to do better.
If there really is a high chance of AI leading to the extinction of humanity within years/decades, then the only rational stance towards safety monitoring and research pacing should be stringent, top-down government involvement and universally ratified international treaties.
To me, the possibility of partnership is the feeling that despite the fundamental chasm between two human beings, love allows us to bridge the gap; alienation is the feeling that the gap cannot be bridged, and moreover, that I do not want to.
Keeping the RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 runs as a plausible upper limit is particularly important given that recent research has emphasized the possibility that models are underestimating future warming.
So we should also have the humility. As amazing as the LLMs are now, it could be that they eventually plateau. We haven't seen any evidence of it yet, and I think this is also why we're seeing this absolute gobsmacking levels of investment, because so far the scaling laws are true, and the more billions are poured in, the more intelligence comes out.
Then there's another possibility which is that it actually already has worked but just the productivity boost isn't as big as would be obvious if people got 10% more productive. That would still be pretty impressive because it's hard to get a 10% across the board uplift.
Such, indeed fragile, peace not only puts an end to today’s carnage, but leaves open a possibility of eventual long-term solution between Russia and Ukraine.
It's like they have all the wisdom of their most senior engineers looking at every single diff and that is fantastic. Which means that you don't have to worry about remembering and looking and nitpicking and all the things that we're not good at anyway
And the plan doc, what was bad about it is it didn't give you leverage. The plan was every single line of code that was going to change like in diff blocks and like all the new stuff to write. And so like people would review these plans. We recommended this. We told people to read the plans. We read all our plans. And then eventually I found myself like I just kind of skimmed the plans.
So, uh I'm interested in the possibility that actually the right way to think about Neanderthals is actually as somehow culturally modern humans. Uh and uh even though that genetically they're mostly Denisovans.
And I think the like the third and the most interesting possibility is no, that like they're they're a new type of object in some in some sense. They should be taken very seriously as as explanations, but where in the past we haven't had the ability to really do anything with them.
there’s like a line to walk between being seriously concerned, but not fearmongering because fearmongering destroys the possibility of creating something special with a thing.
And so that's the last thing which was very surprising to me which is that like we already reversibly cry preserve tissue including human tissue including whole body human tissue at that very very small like you know in a couple hundred cells stage
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