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Will AI see sudden progress?

By Katja Grace, 24 February 2018 Will advanced AI let some small group of people or AI systems take over the world? AI X-risk folks and others have accrued lots of arguments about this over

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AI Timelines

Electrical efficiency of computing

Computer performance per watt has probably doubled every 1.5 years between 1945 and 2000. Since then the trend slowed. By 2015, performance per watt appeared to be doubling every 2.5 years. Details In 2011 Jon

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Hardware and AI Timelines

Nordhaus hardware price performance dataset

This page contains the data from Appendix 2 of William Nordhaus’ The progress of computing in usable formats. Notes This data was collected from Appendix 2 of The progress of computing, using Tabula (a program for turning

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AI Timelines

2018 price of performance by Tensor Processing Units

Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) perform around 1 GFLOPS/$, when purchased as cloud computing. Details In February 2018, Google Cloud Platform blog says their TPUs can perform up to 180 TFLOPS, and currently cost $6.50/hour. This

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Uncategorized

Examples of AI systems producing unconventional solutions

This page lists examples of AI systems producing solutions of an unexpected nature, whether due to goal misspecification or successful optimization.  This list is highly incomplete. List CoastRunners’ burning boat Incomprehensible evolved logic gates AlphaGo’s

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Continuity of progress

Historic trends in altitude

Published 7 Feb 2020 Altitude of objects attained by man-made means has seen six discontinuities of more than ten years of progress at previous rates since 1783, shown below. Year Height (m) Discontinuity (years) Entity