lurker

joined 5 months ago
[–] lurker@awful.systems 2 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

Should’ve left in the full footnote:

”The AI 2027 scenario is still roughly what we expect the future to look like: a mad scramble to superintelligence leading to either AI takeover or extreme concentration of power. So far reality is tracking closer to AI 2027 than even we expected. (2027 was our modal year at time of publication, not our median.) You can read more about our views on timelines here and here.”

So yeah you’re bang on the money. Funny how they went on a press tour hyping up Kokotajlo as a forecaster and claiming that dismissing AI 2027 as hype was a “grave mistake” to “yeah we did not expect for it to follow our predictions” and still being slower than what they predicted

[–] lurker@awful.systems 2 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

Piggybacking off myself to say that the way they wrote the update on their 2025 review is weird. I’m assuming that they mean 2025 was 65% pace but 2026 crept up to 75%, but the way they wrote it makes me think that they actually meant to say “we originally thought 2025 was 65%, but new data shows it was actually 75%” which would be odd, I’m still assuming the former since it makes more sense to me (they also drop it with zero elaboration like, what metric increased with this new data since this was an overall % of pace? not to mention the real percentage was 58-66% based off their means and medians so it would actually look like 58-76% pace)

I mean no matter which way you spin it we’re still going slower than AI 2027, so hooray

(turned this into a second comment so they first one wouldn’t be a wall of text)

[–] lurker@awful.systems 5 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (3 children)

Oh damn, they originally said it was gonna be called AI 2030, so they pushed it back a bit

It’s not a rehash of AI 2027 with moved-back timelines like I thought it would be, instead its what they believe should happen in regards to AI development

Plan A is our positive vision for what should happen instead. In this scenario, humanity delays the development of superintelligence until 2040, makes all AI research public, allows dozens of companies globally to catch up to the frontier, and intentionally enters a regime of mutually assured compute destruction.

And in the first footnote:

So far reality is tracking closer to AI 2027 than even we expected. (2027 was our modal year at time of publication, not our median.)

According to them, preliminary analysis of the data as of July 2026 says that rate of progress is 75% of AI 2027. This says Daniel K only believes in a 25% chance of AGI by the end of 2027, their model also hasn’t changed so their medians are still shown as beyond 2027. Footnote 11 also flat-out says they have no idea how much things will keep progressing

I’m not gonna be able to go through the whole thing because busy today, but those are my observations based off a quick glance

[–] lurker@awful.systems 5 points 2 days ago (3 children)

so its Bad bad now

Unfortunately for everybody, it’s managed to outperform even the most cynical doomsday forecasts, to the degree that the US economy is now in even worse shape than it was right before an infamous downturn in the late 1920s. That’s according to the Telegraph‘s economics columnist Russ Mould, who notes that the overvaluation of US stocks has passed the level that brought the stock market to its knees to kick off the Great Depression.

The US Treasury has also admitted that the AI bubble poses systemic risks

get ready for it to get bloody

[–] lurker@awful.systems 5 points 3 days ago

Harari is an open transhumanist from when I did some research into him when I found him on this interview so this seems in character

[–] lurker@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago

They also made the “Yudkowsky is frequently, confidently, egregiously wrong” post

[–] lurker@awful.systems 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

They are writing another scenario called “AI 2030” (which we already discussed here) so I wouldn’t be surprised if they decide to ignore the elephant in the room

[–] lurker@awful.systems 11 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

As expected. It’s grifting the whole way down, never about “safety” but always about money

[–] lurker@awful.systems 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Then hand me that hammer and let’s get to smashing those data centres

[–] lurker@awful.systems 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

“We have to pick between the climate or AI”

No we don’t??? One problem directly affects the other. Stopping AI data centre build-out helps with stopping climate change.

[–] lurker@awful.systems 5 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

I could’ve sworn I posted this here but apparently not: the first AI winter in the 1960s-70s which is pretty relevant to today

[–] lurker@awful.systems 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

well great now I’m thinking about this

 

Originally posted in the Stubsack, but decided to make it its own post because why not

 

this was already posted on reddit sneerclub, but I decided to crosspost it here so you guys wouldn’t miss out on Yudkowsky calling himself a genre savy character, and him taking what appears to be a shot at the Zizzians

 

originally posted in the thread for sneers not worth a whole post, then I changed my mind and decided it is worth a whole post, cause it is pretty damn important

Posted on r/HPMOR roughly one day ago

full transcript:

Epstein asked to call during a fundraiser. My notes say that I tried to explain AI alignment principles and difficulty to him (presumably in the same way I always would) and that he did not seem to be getting it very much. Others at MIRI say (I do not remember myself / have not myself checked the records) that Epstein then offered MIRI $300K; which made it worth MIRI's while to figure out whether Epstein was an actual bad guy versus random witchhunted guy, and ask if there was a reasonable path to accepting his donations causing harm; and the upshot was that MIRI decided not to take donations from him. I think/recall that it did not seem worthwhile to do a whole diligence thing about this Epstein guy before we knew whether he was offering significant funding in the first place, and then he did, and then MIRI people looked further, and then (I am told) MIRI turned him down.

Epstein threw money at quite a lot of scientists and I expect a majority of them did not have a clue. It's not standard practice among nonprofits to run diligence on donors, and in fact I don't think it should be. Diligence is costly in executive attention, it is relatively rare that a major donor is using your acceptance of donations to get social cover for an island-based extortion operation, and this kind of scrutiny is more efficiently centralized by having professional law enforcement do it than by distributing it across thousands of nonprofits.

In 2009, MIRI (then SIAI) was a fiscal sponsor for an open-source project (that is, we extended our nonprofit status to the project, so they could accept donations on a tax-exempt basis, having determined ourselves that their purpose was a charitable one related to our mission) and they got $50K from Epstein. Nobody at SIAI noticed the name, and since it wasn't a donation aimed at SIAI itself, we did not run major-donor relations about it.

This reply has not been approved by MIRI / carefully fact-checked, it is just off the top of my own head.

 

I searched for “eugenics” on yud’s xcancel (i will never use twitter, fuck you elongated muskrat) because I was bored, got flashbanged by this gem. yud, genuinely what are you talking about

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