most surveys find that the median AI researcher forecasts about a 5% chance of extinction or similar "doom" from AI, while the mean probability is much higher -- around 15-20% -- due to a smallish group who give very high probabilities of doom.
Many frontier lab employees, especially at Anthropic, are out of touch and this will impact their forecasting and/or descriptions of current AI events.
In other words, it is not harmless optimism to act like Trump might help Ukraine, it is falling for a deadly, pro-Putin maneuver that is and will increasingly lead to Ukrainian suffering.
By the way, this is the pattern in a lot of regulation. It doesn't come from like some well-meaning person trying to keep the public safe. It comes from some entrenched, frankly, lazy interest that doesn't want to have to compete and runs to DC or runs to the local regulator and tries to use the power of government to shut their competition down. I think this is deeply unethical, but it happens all the time.
rather than thinking about individual forecasts like what me and Phil are going to do, rather looking at kind of like basically generating prediction markets, where you get aggregate forecasts, where you get like kind of wisdom of the crowd effects. And kind of the reason that I think this is because we have been famously terrible at forecasting.
13 years ago, at the Wired 2013 event in London, I was asked when robotaxis would arrive there and as a joke, gave an answer of June 22, 2026 that turned out to be impossibly spot on.
And so everything is lazy and deferred and functional and reusable inside the compiler. And it's a very different way of writing compilers than than what the textbooks will traditionally teach you.
But for a variety of reasons I think it makes more sense to stay agnostic about forecasts of potential GDP growth, and focus more on the signals the current performance of the economy is sending.
1929, and man, history does rhyme. Too much leverage, too much risk. Everyone thinks it's going to be great. No one thinks it's going to go down a lot.
Worse, as the latest Apple papers shows, LLMs may well work on your easy test set (like Hanoi with 4 discs) and seduce you into thinking it has built a proper, generalizable solution when it does not.
The problem with a blank chat box on a blank page is that it violates the first rule of a high-quality user experience: it isn’t obvious what I can do.
Q3 2024 had the rate 8.9% so there is no way it can reach 30% in 2027. I was way too optimistic at a time when EV enthusiasts thought I was horribly pessimistic.
Until we develop better ways to bridge this gap - aligning what analysts understand with what is formally forecast - we'll continue to see the same pattern: reality consistently outperforming conservative predictions.
It's time for the field to stop attributing benefits to clinical experience. Beyond the obvious ethical concerns, doing so actually prevents us from improving our effectiveness!
So, imagine under those conditions and context that someone is persecuting ethnic Russians or Russian speakers. One, to believe in something like that, one important precondition is never to step your foot in Ukraine.
I’d say for humanity, it’s both a tribute to the ability of discovery and the ability of really believing in things so that you have the confidence to go look for them, but it’s also a cautionary tale that you don’t want to assume things before they’ve been actually found.
I think the weird thing about being a scientist or an academic in general is you have to believe really strongly what you do while questioning it all the time. That’s a hard balance to have.
I see lots of hype about eVTOLs being on the verge of being big, but I can’t find any videos of prototypes doing what the hype says will be common place by 2025.
I may have I may be an investor. I have a track record of calling the market right in the last five times. People say, "Wow, he really knows what he's talking about." But there are lots of people who are trying to predict which way the market is going to go. And some of them are going to get it right by chance. And people assume it's because they know what they're what they're doing, and in fact they're just the lucky ones.
This isn’t because they are ‘lazy’ – the ‘lazy peasant’ (or poor worker generally) is a standard hypocrisy of the literature of the leisured aristocratic class towards poor farmers, today and in the past – but because they have priorities which are simply not served by labor maximization.
And beyond that, by the time solar scale has doubled 4 more times, to the equivalent of 16% of today’s electricity demand (and somewhat less of future demand), we should see solar at 3 cents per kwh in the sunniest areas, and 4.5 cents per kwh in moderately sunny areas.
Their words now
Both of those forecasts were wrong. Solar has plunged in price faster than anyone – including me – predicted.
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