AGI might be here soon, but what can you actually do about it? I'm writing a new guide to that. Stay tuned for updates, but here's a summary:

Why to quit your job and work on risks from AI (the short version) 🧵

What can experts tell us about when AGI will arrive?

Maybe not much. Except that it's coming sooner than before.

I did a review of the 5 most relevant expert groups and what we can learn from them..

Why has there been so little AI automation, despite great benchmark scores? This chart is a big part of the answer.

Models today can do tasks up to 1h.

But real jobs mainly consist of tasks taking days or weeks.

So AI can answer questions but can't do real jobs.

But that's about to change..

AI CEOs claim AGI will be here in 2-5 years.

Is this just hype, or could they be right?

I spent weeks writing this new in-depth primer on the best arguments for and against.

Starting with the case for...🧵

This week, METR released a wild graph: it was a plot of the length of tasks AI can do over time, which when projected forward, appears to get us to ‘AGI’ by 2028.

It’s perhaps the most important single piece of evidence for short timelines we have right now.

1/ Let's imagine OpenAI actually creates AGI in 2027 for $30bn. It's ethical, law-abiding and aligned with users. What happens next?

Cost to replicate the model drops 10x per year. In a couple of years, it's cheap enough that hundreds of companies can do it...

1/ Most AI risk discussion focuses on sudden takeover by super capable systems.

But when I imagine the future, I see a gradual erosion of human influence in an economy of trillions of AIs.

So I'm glad to see a new paper about those risks🧵

Tyler Cowen on o1:
I also would add that if you are not familiar with o1 pro, your observations about the shortcomings of AI models should be discounted rather severely. And o3 pro is due soon, presumably it will be better yet.

Survey of 900 experts by World Economic Forum reveals they have bizarre views about the biggest global risks.

Most severe 10 year risk is extreme weather events??

1/ Most think of AI as a pattern-matching chatbot that's plateauing due to lack of data.

They've totally missed the new paradigm: teaching AI to reason using reinforcement learning.

Here's an attempt at an explainer of why it's the biggest thing going on right now.