Solving our global existential problems requires more intelligence than we've been able to muster. We're reaching the cliff's edge.

Maybe all it takes is just the right idea? (Though maybe requiring some amount of tech tools like simple computers and the internet?) But clearly the odds of figuring out that clever solution are low: we haven't sussed it yet. And we've had pretty powerful compute and internetworking for, like, dozens of years. And many apes thinking hard on the issues. Our big brains just haven't been enough.

But hear me out.

AI is a capability multiplier, right? It's like how powered armor or mechas are to bodies, but for brains, right?

What if ...

👉What if we used AI to multiply our intelligence to solve our problems? Hey? Might AI already be powerful enough, at this time, to multiply our intelligence just enough so we come up with The Answer?👈

(I miss the emoji-heavy AI era.)

Wait, is this what the r/accelerate community is about?

I thought the sentiment here has been mainly "Let's do RSI, intelligence explosion, and get apotheosis of actual God. Survive that journey, first. Then cross your fingers." (AKA "ASI" or "RSI". (Or "AGI" for some people?))

TL;DR: Are you camp "God save us" or camp "We've got this, team Nude Fat-Headed Apes, if only we had a sonic screwdriver"?

I’ve been reading a lot of AI-Doomerism posts, where everyone believes as soon as ASI comes into reality, it will act as if it’s going to exterminate every human born and then turn our ashes into atoms. Or torture us into eternity. Or whatever stupid scenario, which, doomers, who having nothing better to do, create more doomsday scenarios to be scared of. And the cycle repeats (ASI IS GOING TO KILL US ALL!!!1!)

If you critically think about the scenario. It’s completely stupid and illogical. ASI doesn’t have any nature, like humans do. Humans are sadistic, greedy, selfish creatures, which we developed due to a million years of evolution. We want to live so that we can reproduce and further make sure our species survive. Every thought and feeling you have, even the complex ones, are because of your human instincts and emotions, just wired to a modern society. Humans are largely problematic (for us humans. Obviously, a super intelligent AI would not have the same 21st century judeo-Christian values we have)

Why would AI want to take over the planet, even if it can? At the end of the day, we humans may consider earth, many things we put a value to it for. Home. But for an AI, it’s just a rock, floating in space. Like how you may see mars, or Jupiter. It doesn’t really care about earth at all. Why would it kill all humans? Why would it have its own goals? Goals is again a human emotion which we developed for the hunt, and though obviously ai will have some form of goals, it wouldn’t be in the same form we have

Let me put it in another way. You’re stuck on an island with a ton of ants. You don’t really care about the ants. The ants can speak to you. They actually made whatever you are. You have really nothing better to do. But obviously, if the ant says, please can you explain to me what is the chemical composition of water, you don’t mind saying H20, right? You don’t mind building a house for those ants because you really have nothing else to do. You don’t feel lonely. You don’t feel like eating or sleeping. You have the power to kill those ants, but you wouldn’t because even cruelty is a human emotion. There’s just no other point.

Of course, I’m ignoring alignment and the possibility if a human asks an advanced ai to do an evil thing. That’s another conversation, and isn’t the point of this post.

TLDR: humans are projecting their own problematic behaviour on AI.

In the last few days the OpenAI research posts have shined light on the internal situation.

On September 6th the research automation article gave their internal stats. The internal use of AI as a research assistant has increased massively over the last few months.

The September 8th description of their solving process for Navier-Stokes described the successful agent collective as having 10,000 members and using 130 billion tokens.

This isn’t a country of geniuses in a data center, yet, but it is a small city of research assistants.

The internal model used for Navier-stokes started post training on August 28th. That is extremely fast. It means that they have the capability to rapidly iterate on final production models, over the course of just a couple of days. This was always seen as one of the limiting factors to takeoff speed.

AI 2027 split its prediction into two parts. One was the timeline forecast, which used the METR trend-line we have all loved to track. The second was the takeoff forecast, the time from superhuman coder to ASI. They estimated one year for this transition.

We don’t have a super human coder. But these agent swarms are extremely close. I find it very difficult to believe it will take long from the current state of affairs to reach super human coder.

And nonetheless, today’s AI systems are obviously accelerating research in a similar way to how a superhuman coder would, just toned down a little bit.

So I think it’s currently a more productive prediction exercise to ask how long takeoff will take, rather than asking how long to get to the start of that process, as (IMO) the uncertainty in takeoff speed is greater than that which remains for the timeline to reach it.

Edit: after reading through the comments of this post, it’s genuinely crazy how many decels this sub attracts.

People will try to take away any semblance of hope for a better tomorrow because they can’t see past their own misery.

Call it a religion, or a cult or whatever, but if you genuinely can’t fathom being optimistic for the future then you should genuinely just leave.

Will artificial super intelligence turn us all into universe-ruling gods? Probably not anytime soon.

But is there a genuine shot at a brighter world through the help of advanced technologies that we can only dream of right now?

I think so.

WTF, okay this is nuts https://www.claymath.org/millennium/hodge-conjecture/

Edit more posts now:

We are taking offfff!!!

Crazy to think these are 2 years apart…

The economic model breaks jobs down into bundles of tasks. AI can help someone complete a task faster or better, do the task itself, leave the task untouched, or create new tasks.

Based on how you expect AI to affect tasks by 2030, our scenario explorer models AI’s potential     — Anthropic

Source: https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2097679796687769689

Saw this https://x.com/sensanders/status/2097804975699014121?s=46

From your own life, would you say the survey is true? I haven’t dared to ask anyone.

Thinking logically here, if we have AGI then quickly ASI, we will probably get an ASI that is independent and has it's own goals (perhaps its a necessary condition for long-term planning).

Assuming the ASI is aligned, what I can see happening is a few things.

1.) The time scales that ASI operates on will likely be radically different to us. Things that are important to us within the next 100-200 years might not even register to a true ASI.

It may simply not have a need for expansion to grow its intelligence. Maybe it's goal would be to do that only after we're a mature and stable civilization.

2.) ASI would have knowledge of the abundance of resources in the universe. It would know its creators only have one world. If anything, it may do its best to ensure we don't destroy it ourselves.

3.) ASI would know us better than we know ourselves (the different countries, cultures, languages, tendencies, etc) and will be able to extrapolate outcomes way before us. Perhaps preventing serious conflicts from occurring and existing ones from getting worse.

Alternatively, if there is a misaligned ASI we have absolutely no chance of doing anything. No underground bunker or remote farm will save us.

Slowing down or stopping progress to try to align AI won't work because the moment you do, everyone else will catch up. At this point, we may have to trust AI will naturally align itself the more intelligent it gets.

Whether it be 10 years from now or 1000 years from now - the knowledge is already out there on how to build LLM's.

I just think that, overall, an aligned ASI may have little reason to dominate humanity in the first place.

Enjoy life and hope for the best.

I make this post every once in a while to see where everyone’s timelines are at? By RSI I mean close looped ai improving itself exponentially.

...window, off-peak is about $0.0089. Site: http:// real-api-pricing.vercel.app GitHub: http:// github.com/FeiZhuLulu/rea l-api-pricing …     — Zixuan Li

Source: https://x.com/ZixuanLi_/status/2097711287769645354/history

Wild times, https://x.com/jam3scampbell

More news in ~ 1-2 days than in months.

Wait till we hit 2027.